What's up with phamacists?

Factual Questions
1

The cliche is that they just move pills from the big bottle to the little bottle.

Do they dispense medical advice? Since they can’t examine the patient, when would you even ask their advice?
I know they can look up drug interactions now, but doctors offices do that anyway.

Do they really need medical training? Why? Seems like the job is almost all record keeping. Sure they have to know what’s deadly and what’s not good in clear bottles and what the shelf life is, but all that is unconnected with actually dissecting frogs and taking biopsy labs.

2

Doctor’s offices don’t always look up the interactions as well as they should. In addition, while a person may go to several doctors (specialists and GPs) they usually only go to a single pharmacist, so if they forget to tell Dr. B what Dr. A prescribed then the pharmacist can catch it. They also know how the drugs work (i.e. is this a stimulant or does it replace a protein?) which can help a lot when patients buy OTC drugs or when they have consultation questions.

My siblings and sister-in-law are all pharmacists and generally speaking I think they’re all grossly overpaid, but they are definitely professionals.

3

Doctor’s offices don’t always look up the interactions as well as they should. In addition, while a person may go to several doctors (specialists and GPs) they usually only go to a single pharmacist, so if they forget to tell Dr. B what Dr. A prescribed then the pharmacist can catch it. They also know how the drugs work (i.e. is this a stimulant or does it replace a protein?) which can help a lot when patients buy OTC drugs or when they have consultation questions.

The person moving the pills from jar to bottle is more than likely a Pharm Tech who’s making, depending on the place, between $8 and $20 per hour. A pharmacist has to be on duty while they’re working, but the tech’s can fill the prescriptions themselves.

My siblings and sister-in-law are all pharmacists and generally speaking I think they’re all grossly overcompensated, but they are definitely professionals. It’s in the consultations that they really earn their pay (though 96% or whatever of their prescription fills are “here you go, that’ll be a $30 co-pay” simple stuff).

4

Catching drug interactions is a big and potentially life-saving one.

There are some drugs that require consultation- the pharmacist is expected to be able to relate an deep understanding of the nuances of these drugs to their patients- exactly what window of time they must be taken, how they will affect food, etc. Pharmacists can also prescribe some drugs on their own. In some areas, they may be more important in people’s medical lives than doctors. It may seem like not much to someone who takes one or two prescriptions, but when dealing with multiple complicated prescriptions pharmacists really need to know what they are doing.

5

Hot medical advice in the sense of diagnosing diseases, but for sure medical advice in the effects the drugs may have. I usualy throw away the “disclaimer sheet” that comes with every prescription. (If you take this drug you may get headaches, joint stiffness, runny nose, watering eyes, drowsiness, inability to sleep, diarhea, constipation, or the best, “Certain sexual side effects” Like what? a pecker growing out of my forehead? ) But back tp the point, The pharmacist warned me, do not take this without a lot of water. I did not heed his advice and paid dearly in the form of stomach cramps. As far as I am concerned a good pharmacist is just as valuable as a good MD.

6

Pharmacists in the US are really just managers of the “pharmacy department” of the store they work in. If a customer states, “I have X, do you have anything that will help?”, the pharmacist can recommend over-the-counter treatments for X. They cannot hand out prescription medications without a doctor’s authorization, nor can they diagnose an ailment on their own.

As others have pointed out, their most useful function in the US is to identify drug interactions, and to explain side effects. Before we had the WWW and the ability to look up this information ourselves, this was a critical role. Even now, the pharmacist is the best source for information about possible side effects, inactive ingredients in a medication, etc. (For example, I have severe reactions to aspartame. I’m not PKU, but aspartame gives me extremely bad headaches, so I try to avoid giving it to my children, just in case they have the same reaction. However, many chewable medications are sweetened with aspartame, so I want to be sure that if a doctor prescribes the “chewable” form of a medication, that aspartame is not one of the ingredients. If aspartame is there, the pharmacist can tell me and contact the doctor about an alternate form.)

In other countries, though, pharmacists have a lot more “power.” I lived in France for a few years, and really appreciated the fact that I could walk into a pharmacie, describe my symptoms, and walk out with medication to treat those symptoms in most situations. This is true for very common problems, like colds, flus, ingrown toenails, etc. I developed bronchitis once while I was living there, and happened to visit the wife of a pharmacist just as the bronchitis reached its peak. The pharmacist recognized my cough, and pulled an antibiotic throat lozenge off his shelf for me. He wouldn’t even accept payment–he said I should treat it as part of his wife’s payment to me for my assistance in translating her French materials into English.

In cases where the pharmacist recognizes that more extensive treatments are necessary, or where they can’t simply pull meds off the shelves as a cure, they tell the customer to go see a doctor.