Gabriel Ibis

Public health is not an easy task to enforce—and in a country like the Philippines, where universal health care exists only on paper, risks add up when non-experts dabble in fields where expertise is most needed.


Pharmacy as a field is not nascent in the Philippines. In fact, when the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Medicine and Surgery was established in 1871, it was the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, showing the field’s relative age and depth of understanding.

However, pharmacists, among many other allied medical professions, are still seen as subpar to medical doctors, thus, its continued under-appreciated status in Philippine society.

The recent move of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and private firm Customer First Distribution, Inc. of “allowing” sari-sari stores to dispense over-the-counter medication is proof of this continued status of the allied health field. 

This regulatory change simplifies patient accessibility yet produces ambiguity between licensed medical professionals and untrained vendors who possess no fundamental pharmaceutical knowledge. 

In practice, patients obtain different dosing guidelines while facing the danger of adverse medication effects and postponing essential medical treatment for critical health issues.

Public health risks escalate when untrained sellers step into this unfilled space. Research data indicates that antibiotics get sold in 60% of sari-sari stores and 59% of those antibiotics have no expiration labels. As early as the 1990s, researchers from the University of the Philippines discovered that more than 60% of village stores in rural Laguna sold antibiotics including amoxicillin cephalexin and anti-tuberculosis drugs in unsafe and incomplete treatment amounts.

The lack of proper medical guidance causes many Filipinos to incorrectly use antibiotics by taking wrong doses and ending treatment too soon and applying them to viral diseases thus speeding up bacterial resistance development.

The World Health Organization (WHO) presents worldwide statistics which predict 10 million deaths every year by 2050 because antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remains unaddressed. The regulatory framework receives no improvement because current policies permit widespread medication misuse.

The health system continues to undervalue pharmacists who provide both initial and final patient contact which creates an unsafe situation where non-experts must substitute for professional care.

Pharmacists serve as the first point of contact for patients who need medical advice but health systems undervalue their role at every level which causes non-experts to step into this gap. They receive training in pharmacology alongside therapeutic methods and patient counseling and adverse-event monitoring yet their professional role faces continuous disregard by the healthcare system. 

The constant reduction of their professional boundaries leads to public undervaluation of their worth thus maintaining a destructive pattern which promotes unregulated healthcare practices.

Despite this, pharmacists remain sidelined as government policies bypass them—preferring quick but dangerous fixes like DTI-sanctioned sari‑sari dispensing schemes.

The public health domain cannot be simplified as a bureaucratic procedure. The goal of universal health care requires systems which center on safety alongside scientific principles and skilled professionals for its actual implementation.

The empowerment of untrained individuals to dispense drugs leads to treatment failures and serious patient injuries. The time has come for lawmakers to understand this basic fact: leave healthcare to health experts, trade to tycoons.