Short abstract:

The care turn of Pharmacy stresses the ambiguity of medication, a substance encompassing remedy and poison. Pharmaceuticals enable life and death, and the pharmacist’s plea to care can guide us to discuss their multiple effects.

Long abstract:

In the 1960s, a group of American pharmacists engaged in a dispute to participate in caring decisions to identify, resolve, and prevent problems caused by medication. Arguing that drug-related problems cost billions worldwide with hospitalization for bad reactions, misuse, drug interactions, and polypharmacy, they claim, as the profession of medication, the area would be the most qualified to intervene in this iatrogenic result of modern biomedicine. They advocate for care actions such as monitoring pharmacotherapy, managing prescriptions from different doctors, creating systems to control misuse, prescribing some medication, and educating society towards rational use. Known as “the care turn of pharmacy,” the movement spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000, gaining considerable relevance in Europe and Latin America. Still, pharmacists are rarely actors of ethnographies, and we know little about how they manage care in their protocols, what the power struggles with doctors are, and how this area enacts drug care and creates infrastructure to control medication use. This paper delves into pharmaceutical bibliography, protocols, and documents to explore this intervention as the first stage of a long-term ethnographic project. Pharmacists’ movement to care stresses the ambiguity of medication, a substance encompassing remedy and poison. Pharmaceuticals enable life and death, and the pharmacist’s plea to care can guide us to discuss their multiple effects.