What exactly do pharmacists do?

[DaShen]

Originally posted by: wasssup

Originally posted by: Sraaz
I've heard pharmacists actually make pretty good money considering what they do.

My sister's good friend and her fiance are both pharmacists, and they're pretty open with their salaries (at least when i spoke to them). They said they start off pretty well, ~$100k, but they cap off pretty quickly too, ~$150k/year.

I wished I did pharmacy instead of comp sci...i'm not really a computer dork anymore...eh whatever.

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.

 

[vi edit]

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.

 

[Syringer]

So, basically the work is extremely easy but getting into and completing pharm school is really hard?

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: Svnla

Originally posted by: wasssup
I wished I did pharmacy instead of ......

Don't feel bad, I feel the same thing. If I knew then what I know now, I would study to become a Pharmacist, 100K easily and you don't have to work 80 hrs a week.

not from some of the pharmacists i've talked to. sometimes they are putting in 10-12 hours a day every day of the week.

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: goku

Originally posted by: jagec
Since doctors have such terrible handwriting, you basically have to know what to prescribe for a given condition

You need 2+years of schooling to read crappy handwriting? So I guess if the doctors start e-mailing the prescription to longs for ex. a machine there will just dispense it for you?

Can you think of a reason not to? After all,drug interactions can be stored on the computer too.

 

[TheNinja]

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."

 

[Sluggo]

I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get those little bottles into the typewriter.




DISCLIAMER:

Yes, this joke was much funnier back when the lables were actually typed on a typewriter.

 

[DainBramaged]

<shifty eyes>

I got some pills for you.

 

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: Syringer
So, basically the work is extremely easy but getting into and completing pharm school is really hard?

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.

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: Syringer
It's not like they advise customers as to what medicines to take to treat whatever conditions they havee, and all the "dirty work" is taken care of through a doctor..

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.

 

[Phoenix86]

Originally posted by: Sluggo
I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get those little bottles into the typewriter.




DISCLIAMER:

Yes, this joke was much funnier back when the lables were actually typed on a typewriter.

It's not easy to get them in a printer either.

 

[Accipiter22]

Originally posted by: iamaelephant
They keep the spiders out of the pill bottles.

mine didn't do his job recently then

 

[GeneValgene]

Originally posted by: vi_edit

Originally posted by: Syringer
So, basically the work is extremely easy but getting into and completing pharm school is really hard?

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.

all of you who think being a pharmacist is a cake walk have no idea what it takes

 

[UglyCasanova]

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.

 

[Tom]

You could have the same discusson about airline pilots or firemen.

It's the occasional out of the ordinary circumstance that they are trained to deal with, that justifies their salaries.

 

[Gibson486]

the pharmaciy majors at my school never leave the library.

 

[sygyzy]

Has anyone personally witnessed or been part of a scenario where a pharmicist actually said "Oh my god, Dr. Gibbons prescribed Transtol STP to you and that has an adverse chemical reaction to the B vitamins in your Flinstones Chewables. I just saved your life."

 

[vi edit]

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.

 

[iamaelephant]

Originally posted by: Accipiter22

Originally posted by: iamaelephant
They keep the spiders out of the pill bottles.

mine didn't do his job recently then

:Q

 

[Shawn]

They have to also make sure that the doctors write the correct prescription. Doctors do mess up sometimes and if the pharmacist doesn't catch it someone could die, depending on the drug.

 

[Midlander]

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.