"Put the prescription in the basket there," shouted the pharmacy boy from his shop overlooking the high Southern wall of RIMS. While I was still wondering about these skyscraper pharmacies suddenly the basket with the prescription in it was hurled up quickly something like that of a pail of a well. Then I turned around and realized that all the pharmacies in the vicinity of the Institute's Gynae Dept hurl the basket - the basket hurling pharmacies.

Some years ago, these pharmacies were very much rooted on the ground but with time and changing policies of RIMS this wall had come up and so also the pharmacies behind them. It is so high now that the only possible way to reach the pharmacies is either by climbing a ladder or through these baskets.

This side of RIMS is mostly thronged by expecting fathers, who are usually in a hurry to get the long list of medicines-including betadine, gloves, silverex etc that would be used during delivery. So they come running to these pharmacies and in their nervousness put the prescription in the basket, collect the medicine and pay the bill and collect the change ---all from the baskets.

Often the expecting father who is always ready to buy anything to ease the wife's pain doesn't bother to countercheck the bill. One should not try to do so if one's mother-in-law is right behind you and if she happens to carry an umbrella! Any way jokes apart, for today lets pick up this thread -the pharmacies.

The basket hurler is obviously not a pharmacist and we are not sure whether the whole pharmacy has a qualified pharmacist or not. Usually a simple registration certificate with a photo should be the best way for us to recognize our dear pharmacist who would dispense what our dear doctor has written so illegibly.

It must be the business opportunities that have caused the mushrooming of many pharmacies around a hospital. And a license has a different and much more meaning than just a permit to open a pharmacy. But it appears that all the family in the vicinity of RIMS especially those nearing the wall have one pharmacist member in the family. Only thing peculiar is that they don't go to any Pharmacy Institute but to their own Pharmacies.

One may still argue that it is service to humanity and that it is these pharmacies that like the Jakhlabanda hotels that open all night and dispense the medicines at those odd hours. This is true and I appreciate it. Some still say that the list of items that the doctor give for a delivery case is stereotyped and even a layman can understand easily. But the only problem is that the dividing line gets blurred and one may trip to the other side of more items beyond the list of delivery.

In health sector we need regulatory bodies and the rules should be binding to all of us doctors, paramedics and the citizens. This I fear will stay for sometime until all of us become educated and become citizens of a present day much-hyped "Arangbi Manipur". Till such days are here we will keep hearing jokes like this one:

Patient: "Give me medicine for loose stool"
Pharmacist: "Take two teaspoonfuls at night time." And he hands over a bottle of Cremmaffin-pink, a laxative.

Around 6-00 in the evening, like Abraham Lincoln coming from miles to return the change, the pharmacist reached the patient's home (who by now is obviously dehydrated with multiple bouts of Diarrhoea.) and asked, "Did you ask to make the stool loose or to stop loose stool?"
whew! What a timely intervention!