I feel the same way, except I would have done Med School. 🙁 But it still isn't too late. It would have been awesome to be a surgeon, that is what I wanted to be since I was a kid, but the chances of becoming a surgeon lessen as you get older because your dexterity is totally different.
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What exactly do pharmacists do?
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I feel the same way, except I would have done Med School. 🙁 But it still isn't too late. It would have been awesome to be a surgeon, that is what I wanted to be since I was a kid, but the chances of becoming a surgeon lessen as you get older because your dexterity is totally different.
Retail/Community pharmacists haven't really helped the image of what Pharmacists are capable of.
My wife is a clinical pharmacist finishing up her last month of a general clinical pharmacy residency. She works in a hospital directly with patients and doctors and other medical providers.
She has a whole list of duties she is responsible for. She is the knowledge holder when it comes to drugs and their interactions. When a doctor makes a suggestion it is her role to question whether that is the proper choice and or the proper dosage. If she doesn't agree with the choice she can make recommdations on alternate methods.
She has to take into consideration many factors that a computer can't project or figure out. This is based upon unique situations that every patient brings with them. Drug overdoses, chronic drug/alcohol abuse, morbid obeseity, pediatrics, existing medical conditions ect. Many of them require you to make clinical based suggestions and not something that is laid out in a book or found on a computer.
My wife spends hours upon hours a week reading through newly published medical journals to learn about new drug therapies that are available and the efficacy of existing treatments. With this constant involvement with the medical community she is able to make suggestions that provide better results to patients in a more efficient manner reducing their stay and lowering costs.
She does much, much more than any Pharmacist working behind the counter of a Walgreens ever will.
Don't base all of your opinions on Pharmacists because of retail.
My wife is a clinical pharmacist finishing up her last month of a general clinical pharmacy residency. She works in a hospital directly with patients and doctors and other medical providers.
She has a whole list of duties she is responsible for. She is the knowledge holder when it comes to drugs and their interactions. When a doctor makes a suggestion it is her role to question whether that is the proper choice and or the proper dosage. If she doesn't agree with the choice she can make recommdations on alternate methods.
She has to take into consideration many factors that a computer can't project or figure out. This is based upon unique situations that every patient brings with them. Drug overdoses, chronic drug/alcohol abuse, morbid obeseity, pediatrics, existing medical conditions ect. Many of them require you to make clinical based suggestions and not something that is laid out in a book or found on a computer.
My wife spends hours upon hours a week reading through newly published medical journals to learn about new drug therapies that are available and the efficacy of existing treatments. With this constant involvement with the medical community she is able to make suggestions that provide better results to patients in a more efficient manner reducing their stay and lowering costs.
She does much, much more than any Pharmacist working behind the counter of a Walgreens ever will.
Don't base all of your opinions on Pharmacists because of retail.
Jerry Seinfeld: Why does that pharmacist have to be two and a half feet higher than everybody else? Who the hell is this guy? "Clear out everybody I'm workin with pills up here. I'm taking pills from this big bottle and then I'm gonna put them in a little bottle! That's my whole job.I can't be down on the floor with you people. Then I'm gonna type out, on a little piece of paper. And it's really hard."
DainBramaged
Lifer
<shifty eyes>
I got some pills for you.
I got some pills for you.
Depends on your defintion of easy.
If you are in a retail setting you are busing your ass sometimes upwards of 60+ hours a week dealing with old people bitching nonstop about how expensive their drugs are. Having to deal with insurance companies every day, and then still have to put up with management turning you into a glorified salesperson trying to peddle products for profit.
If you work in a clinical environment you have to walk the fine line of being completely unbiased and not shatter the fragile egos of doctors. You have to accept responsibility for the fact that if you F-up...you could very well kill someone. You have to make sure that a doctor doesn't f-up and kill someone. You have to make sure that nurse is properly following directions and doesn't f-up and kill someone. Then you have to deal with the fact that you are working directly with very sick people that very well could die on your shift or be dead the next morning. Plus there's the whole continuously keeping up with the ever changing drug industry and making sure that you know the best treatments out there.
You aren't busting your balls digging ditches for a living...but it's by no means is a mentally easy job.
Actually, that's precisely why pharmacists make decent coin. They have to understand all of the effects and side-effects of medicines, as well as the interactions among them. For instance, a pharmacist needs to be able to immediately recognize a problem if they see that you're taking an MAOI as well as an SSRI.
It's amazing how little attention some doctors pay to the medications you're taking, so the pharmacist is like a second line of defense when it comes to preventing dangerous drug interactions.
Accipiter22
Banned
mine didn't do his job recently then 🙁
GeneValgene
Diamond Member
all of you who think being a pharmacist is a cake walk have no idea what it takes
UglyCasanova
Lifer
The pharmacy degree here is a 6 year program and is extremely, extremely competitive. I'm sure there is more to it than just putting pills in a bottle. My mom is a pharmacists and she does made loads of cash though. 🙂
This is vi_edit's wifey...
As a clinical pharmacist in an academic institution, a MASSIVE part of my day is actually spent educating physicians and medical students. They are the masters of diagnostics. My job is to know the drugs/therapy, in and out. I need to know how the drugs interact with each other, not just in terms of metabolism (which computers can do for me) but also how the clinical effect of each drug interacts with each other and with the disease states that each particular patient has.
I also need to be able to look at doses of drugs and know that it is appropriate when accounting for a myriad of variables that may affect each patient.
In addition, I am responsible for monitoring for the appropriate effect. You can't just prescribe a med and pray that it does what it is supposed to do, you have to have follow-up. A patient may need an increase/decrease in dose, may experience toxicity, or any other number of other outcomes.
Here's my final rant. Many people today don't receive care at a single physician, but will only fill their prescriptions at a single pharmacy. A person's internist may prescribe one thing, while the cardiologist prescribes another with contradictory effect. Alternately, a specialist may prescribe a medication, the patient encounters some adverse effect, and an internist prescribes something to treat the side effect. The pharmacist's job is to recognize when this happens, alert both physicians of the problem, and hopefully just stop the offending agent. Why treat a side-effect when you can just stop taking the one that caused the problem in the first place?
I know that sometimes it seems like we aren't doing all that we could be doing. Consider this: maybe we aren't helping you more because you are too busy to let us help. Next time, rather than complaining that you had to wait 10 minutes for your prescriptions, let us take a few minutes with you to run through your meds to make sure they're working in the best possible way.
As a clinical pharmacist in an academic institution, a MASSIVE part of my day is actually spent educating physicians and medical students. They are the masters of diagnostics. My job is to know the drugs/therapy, in and out. I need to know how the drugs interact with each other, not just in terms of metabolism (which computers can do for me) but also how the clinical effect of each drug interacts with each other and with the disease states that each particular patient has.
I also need to be able to look at doses of drugs and know that it is appropriate when accounting for a myriad of variables that may affect each patient.
In addition, I am responsible for monitoring for the appropriate effect. You can't just prescribe a med and pray that it does what it is supposed to do, you have to have follow-up. A patient may need an increase/decrease in dose, may experience toxicity, or any other number of other outcomes.
Here's my final rant. Many people today don't receive care at a single physician, but will only fill their prescriptions at a single pharmacy. A person's internist may prescribe one thing, while the cardiologist prescribes another with contradictory effect. Alternately, a specialist may prescribe a medication, the patient encounters some adverse effect, and an internist prescribes something to treat the side effect. The pharmacist's job is to recognize when this happens, alert both physicians of the problem, and hopefully just stop the offending agent. Why treat a side-effect when you can just stop taking the one that caused the problem in the first place?
I know that sometimes it seems like we aren't doing all that we could be doing. Consider this: maybe we aren't helping you more because you are too busy to let us help. Next time, rather than complaining that you had to wait 10 minutes for your prescriptions, let us take a few minutes with you to run through your meds to make sure they're working in the best possible way.
iamaelephant
Diamond Member
:Q
Well, I used to work in a drugstore. As far as I could tell, the pharmacist deciphered what the doctor wrote on the little piece of paper, they translated that to typing on another little piece of paper and adhered that to a little bottle. Then they counted little pills and put them in the little bottle.
I certainly don't remember a single time when they caught a possible harmful drug interaction.
I certainly don't remember a single time when they caught a possible harmful drug interaction.
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