Big Pharma Needs To Show Some Rcepest
I am a strong believer that our salvation as professionals is counseling. If we follow our personal professional standards, ethics and the law, we will counsel. We will counsel with new prescriptions and we will counsel on OTCs.
If we neglect to counsel, we will sacrifice our professional standing.
I can hear some of you whine, “But, Jay Pee, the timers. The DM nails us when the timers look bad. I DON’T HAVE TIME.”
You can be a slave to the Prescription Mill, a glorified technician or you can be a pharmacist. Your choice!
Counseling does not have to take a lot of time. Thirty seconds to hit the high points. Beyond that, most patients won’t listen. Some drugs may take five minutes. I had a woman the other day who did not want to listen. I had to repeat the warnings. Finally, I grabbed her hand and made her look at me. I asked her, “Do you want to decline this counseling?”
“No, why would I do that?”
“Because you are not listening to me.”
“After that, it took 30 seconds.”
I want to examine pharmacist prescribing. Either defacto when the doctor screws up and asks what you would choose or when the pharmacist is the primary prescriber.
We need to bring this to light. We need to bring this out into the world because it is only reasonable that the drug expert would prescribe the drugs.
Please send me your thoughts at jpgakis@hotmail.com.
Tell me about your prescribing. I’d like to hand over a ton of evidence to the editors at the magazine to influence a cover story.
I have corresponded with a psychiatric pharmacist in California who prescribes for every patient in the hospital.
A hospital pharmacist in the Midwest reported that he was captive in the ER because the foreign ER doctors had no clue when the emergency was a real emergency. The stress got to the RPh. He used CIII drugs illicitly to take the edge off. He now works for a retail chain and considers it to be paradise.
I know that many of you prescribe. Please tell us about it and send me your thoughts privately.
There is a matter of respect here. Big Pharma has been ignoring us for over a decade. If we are going to be prescribers, and it is inevitable, I want Big Pharma to come back home and court us a little. We are the drug experts and they aren’t even advertising in our magazines anymore. That is disrespect.
Jay Pee















