Do European pharmacists really have to trespass on medicine?

Excerpt

Pharmacy has been traditionally regarded as an intermediate discipline between health and chemistry [1], rooted in drug development, production, and compounding. The vast majority of pharmacists used to make drugs until the 1950s, no matter whether they worked in hospital or in community. These tasks have been almost lost with the large-scale manufacturing of pharmaceuticals by industry, and dispensing remains the main historical activity of pharmacists. In the long run, these changes have weakened the combination of the pharmacist's profession and education [2]. Although still focused on scientific subjects (for instance biology, chemistry, and physics), education has been inevitably affected by the domestic regulation of the profession, especially in the community domain, still by far the most important labor market for pharmacy graduates [3]. At present, pharmacy education has found a wide range of uneven solutions in European countries [2], starting from the shortest duration of graduation, which ranges from three (in Finland, Norway and Sweden) to six years (in France and The Netherlands)—with Italy the only continental country that has lengthened the duration in recent decades from 4 to 5 years. …