If my retired pharmacist neighbor is any indication, boring people to death with endless stories about “pharmacist school” is one of the services provided.
Hirka T’Bawa’s post gives an excellent summary of some of the job duties of pharmacists.
Some things a pharmacist has done for me (and therefore my patients) just this month:
Confirmed that an unscored donepezil 10mg pill can be split safely to give the patient 5mg when his doctor lowered the dose in a verbal order to me but didn’t call it into the pharmacy. Google, drugs.com, webmd, the doctor, no one else could tell me. (I could tell that a 23mg tablet should NOT be split, but not whether a 10mg pill can be split. The answer is yes, IF you have a nice sharp pill cutter with a centering device that can actually split it evenly.) This saved the patient about $100 and, more importantly, meant that he didn’t have to miss any doses of his medication before the pharmacy could deliver the 5mg pills a few days later.
Got a patient completely off his insulin, and lower doses of his other diabetes medications, by pointing out that his lovastatin might possibly be causing his high blood sugar spikes when nothing seemed to account for it. Within 48 hours of stopping the lovastatin, the patient’s blood sugars normalized, even after eating meals high in sugar. Apparently while statins include a warning about developing diabetes, the doctors didn’t think of it affecting already-diagnosed diabetes.
Helped arrange things so that I could give a patient his shingles vaccine in his home instead of a doctor’s office. The patient is combative and confused, so this saved us all a lot of trauma and drama. This required a surprising amount of pull and logistics on the part of the pharmacist, because of the transportation and storage requirements for the vaccine, and the “non-routine” nature of the request.
Provided me with emergency supplies of routine medications for a patient whose physician was out of town, while his office was not responding to phone calls or faxes. Without it, I would have had to send the patient to the ER for simple blood pressure management and prevention of seizures.
I can’t imagine doing my job without the help of pharmacists!
No offense to the OP, but the question is worded in such a way that seems to elevate doctors to unquestionable authority - a deity that cannot make a mistake. Doctors are human and make mistakes, and do not have complete knowledge about everything. This is why pharmacists and other specialists exist - to fill in the gaps a doctor may have in being able to provide you with complete care.
Somehow I doubt that “put booze in your ear after swimming” is something that’s taught in either med school or pharmacy school. I suspect the pharmacist learned that somewhere else–personal experience, maybe?
Rubbing alcohol to prevent swimmer’s ear was mentioned in nursing school, and is a common tip given by doctors. It’s on webmd. The CDCsays to use a 1:1 mix of rubbing alcohol and vinegar.
Drinking alcohol instead of rubbing alcohol was probably the pharmacist’s special spin on things. He was probably a drinker. 
Pharmacist here.
90% of the time, there is some truth to what you’re saying, but for the other 10%, we’re there to make sure you get the right medication, and that what the doctor ordered is the correct medication for you and does not have interactions with food, disease states, other medications, etc. In some situations, if a person can’t afford a medication and/or their insurance does not cover it, we’re the ones to talk to regarding alternatives or subsidized programs to help people pay for their meds.
We don’t just count out pills, etc; we have to know what all those drugs, creams, IVs, etc. do and on occasion if it’s even legal for us to dispense it. Some drugs require various levels of permission to fill; the first two that come to mind are thalidomide and Accutane.
Would you know what to do if a nurse asked you if a person who is allergic to sulfa can use triple antibiotic ointment? If an oncologist ordered carboplatin to be dosed at AUC 6? How to dose warfarin to keep the INR between 2 and 3? Or any of a million other related questions.
p.s. We don’t just fill prescriptions for people. We fill them from veterinarians too. 
Some of them may be. The only training required for a pharmacy technician in most areas is a high school education and be 18 years old; diploma programs do exist but we don’t recommend them because they can be expensive and you’re going to learn everything you need to know OTJ anyway.
Hospital technicians are paid somewhat more than retail technicians, which is often minimum wage or slightly more and explains the often-high turnover. However, I’ve worked with many dedicated, hardworking techs over the years. 
We need to make sure that all the information on the label is correct (matches the prescription in every way) and that the contents of the bottle are correct too.
Even if you’ve been taking that medication for 25 years, we still have to make sure it’s right.
(Um, can they?)
Also, while I’ve got you here…one I keep forgetting to ask. Is there really a difference between Neosporin and Triple Antibiotic? I have several doctors who swear that Neosporin causes more irritation and inflammation, and even infection, than Triple Antibiotic. They’ll give me orders specifically for, “Triple Antibiotic, not Neosporin, with each dressing change.”
Are they crazy? Or is there really a difference?
I once filled a perfectly legitimate penicillin prescription on a weekend that was written on a sheet of notebook paper. This man had a toothache, and it was written by his neighbor, a dentist, whose handwriting I recognized. (BTW, doctors don’t have worse handwriting than the general population. Nurses, however, do, at least in my experience. :eek:) Unfortunately, I also filled several very good forgeries that I know of, and probably a few others that I don’t. :o You only get in trouble if you’re in any kind of cahoots with the forger.
Independent pharmacies are like any other independent business in that it’s hard to stay afloat nowadays unless you have a specific niche market. My BFF interviewed at one recently, and hasn’t heard yet if he got the job or not. There are 3 stores and the one he interviewed at specializes in compounding, mostly for veterinarians. Another specializes in long-term care (i.e. nursing and group homes) which is either very lucrative or you lose a lot of money on it.
It’s possible that Neosporin has an excipient ingredient that in the doctors’ experience can cause irritation. Hadn’t heard that myself.
I’m very happy with the Pharmacists I use, but I had a flu shot once at Wahlgreen’s, and it felt and looked like the guy hit my shoulder with a baseball bat.
Thanks. Guess I’ll keep my kit stocked with both.
In addition to the pharmacists you encounter in drugstores, they also work in hospitals and provide advice about medication, and some do basic research on drugs.
I’d say about 1/3 of pharmacists work in a retail setting, 1/2 work in hospitals, and the remainder who are employed as pharmacists work in other environments - teaching, nuclear pharmacy, long term care (closed-door pharmacies that supply nursing and group homes, and county jails, which rarely have their own pharmacies), industry, prisons, etc.
Lets see, when we check a script, we have to verify the data entry, make sure the correct patient, correct drug, correct route, correct directions, correct quantity, and everything else the doctor wrote on the script is correct on the label. We have to make the the correct pills are in the bottle, and then do a DUR, Drug Utilization Review where we make sure the medication doesn’t interact with anything else you’re taking, that the dose and medication is appropriate for the patient, that the patient isn’t filling it too often (can show abuse), or too infrequently (can show compliance issues). We have have to make sure that everything meets legal and insurance requirements, from the paper the script is written on, to having all the correct info, and nothing missing, making sure you’re not using a copay assistance card with government insurance, day supply is correct, making sure the script is signed by the correct provider (In my state, only a MD, DO, Dentist, Vet, or Podiatrist can sign a script for a schedule II medication) provided in the providers scope of practice, for a legitimate medical need (besides the corresponding responsibility of controlled meds, it also means your dentist can’t prescribe you Viagra).
Actually, in a way it was, at least in my school. We had a class on OTC remedies, and one of the products is the common ear drops sold for swimmers ear. The active ingredient is 95% Isopropyl Alcohol, which since one of the most important things we learn is mechanism of actions (The Why’s and How’s something works), tells us that we can substitute Ethyl Alcohol and get the same result… Which is the alcohol in what we drink. So, no a teacher didn’t tell us, but if you add 2 plus 2, you get 4.
Most are. During pharmacy school orientation, one of the speakers made the comment that most pharmacists are even alcoholics or teetotalers. There wasn’t much middle ground. Though, the comment was made in regards to not going crazy at the bars in the area, and was an exaggeration, I don’t know many of my friends who don’t have a beer or a glass or wine (or more) when they get home from a hard day.
Actually, what he said was something like this: “You can put some rubbing alcohol in your ear—ideally at least 50% solution, but you can also just use something like gin or vodka, which is close to that.” This pharmacy was right by the Berkeley campus, so I guess he figured that, as a college student, I’d be likely to have some libations at hand.
Right. And what I appreciated was that this pharmacist didn’t just do what the doctors had done. In the course of casual conversation he talked to me about the likely cause of the infections, and how to avoid them, instead of just writing a prescription until the next time the problem would arise.
Learn something new every day.
[QUOTE=Hirka T’Bawa]
Lets see, when we check a script, we have to verify the data entry, make sure the correct patient, correct drug, correct route, correct directions, correct quantity, and everything else the doctor wrote on the script is correct on the label. We have to make the the correct pills are in the bottle, and then do a DUR, Drug Utilization Review where we make sure the medication doesn’t interact with anything else you’re taking, that the dose and medication is appropriate for the patient…
[/QUOTE]
And this is why it’s really important to use only one pharmacy.
Not counting the chemotherapy itself, my husband is currently on 18 medications. If we were using different pharmacies, it would be impossible for a pharmacist at CVS to know what he was getting from Walgreens and whether or not everything will be hunky-dunky.
Occasionally, it’s not. My husband was taking a maintenance drug that apparently clobbers platelets in combination with one of the chemo drugs, so they flagged it and suggested an alternate med. Just by paying attention, a pharmacist saved my husband from needing some platelet or whole blood transfusions.
This is actually one of the main differences in our education. MD/DO’s spend 4 years in school mainly concentrating on diagnosis, i.e. here are your symptoms, what could be wrong? While in pharmacy school, we spend 4 years learning the disease, medications, treatments, and as I said before, the almighty Mechanism of Action. Once we link the how’s and why’s of the mechanism of action, we can start suggesting things that are more out of the box, and also more useful to the common public.
As I go through my normal response to people who give the way to common exchange “You should have become a doctor”, “I am a doctor, a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD.)” MD/DO’s spend 4 years learning diagnosis, and 1 semester learning pharmacotherapy, while we spend 4 years learning pharmacotherapy, but only 1 semester learning diagnosis. I know just enough diagnosis to tell you if you need an emergency room, or if it can wait the 3 day weekend till your doctor opens, or to suggest a OTC product that might help, but if not, to call your doctor… But once you have a diagnosis of what is actually wrong, I can go all in and tell you what needs to be done, and what drug might be best for you.
In a perfect medical system, the MD/DO would diagnose you, the pharmacist would prescribe you, and the nurse would treat you.