Often when I go to a pharmacy I’m quite annoyed to see pseudoscientific products placed in prominent places (such as the front counter), a typical example would be homeopathic cold “medicine”. If people want to try and treat a cold with tablets or pills which contain no active ingredient then that’s their business, but perhaps not everyone realises that this is what they are buying when they buy a homeopathic medicine. Perhaps they think that if a so-called medicine is on display on the front counter of a pharmacy then it actually works, in that, it has been shown scientifically to have benefit. Not that it is based on some rules that someone made up a couple of hundred years ago which have not been shown to work (sorry, anecdotes don’t count) and which would invalidate much of what we know about medicine, biology, chemistry … even basic logic if they did work. It’s not just homeopathy, pharmacies push other pseudoscience as well (as detailed in the letter linked to below).
So given this, I’m happy to see that the Australian Skeptics are taking pharmacists to task for this. At the second link you can read an open letter they sent out last month, and the response so far. Well done to the Skeptics for taking action on this.