Once In A Blue Moon

‘Why not medicine?’

‘Pharmacist is like, 2^nd class.’

‘Oh pharmacist, the salesgirl who sells medicine in Guardian!’ exclaimed some aunty when she found out that someone is going to be a pharmacist.

‘Pharmacist-counting tablet, so sien man,’ said a friend who now had difficulty to even get into pharmacy.

These are the most common reactions when people asked me what I would do back then and I replied ‘pharmacy’. Trust me, I am not the only one in that. My friends all face the same situations as well.

Hello? Do you have like, chemical engineering being 1^st class, then mechanical engineering being 2^nd upper class??What about E & E engineering?

I cannot say how shallow these people are for allocating ‘class difference’ to the professions. I admit I used to really look up to doctors, as they are the first professionals whom we had direct contact with ever since we were a kid. We remember how he cured our sore throat. We remember that it was he who gave us the lollipop. We remember a compassionate, kind doctor who tried to ease our discomfort and cure out illness.

So we grow up wanting to emulate him. Little did we know that, there are many other professions out there who are unsung heroes in their own respective fields. There will not be a fun-filled, dream-fulfilled Disneyland without engineers and architects, who went through great pain to design the various thrill rides, merry-go-round, taking into account safety and aesthetic values. There will not be a shopping therapy for us if not for civil engineer who built Megamall, One Utama (my 2^nd home) and KLCC. ^_^ I guess you all get the picture.

The unsung heroes in the healthcare profession, I believe, are pharmacists.

I entered the Pharmacy course with the clearest picture of that field among other student, I believe. I have talked to so many people who have been there, done that; I have worked in Guardian and Gleneagles Intan Medical Centre. It was such an eye-opener during my one-week stint in Gleneagles. Only in the inpatient pharmacy that I realized pharmacist is also involved total parenteral nutrition (provision of nutrients to hospitalized patients through intravenous drip), oncology (deals with cytotoxic drugs for cancer patients), counseling discharged patients on drugs treatment and checking for drug interactions (from the prescribed list by doctors), to name a few.

It is definitely MORE than counting tablets. After all, we don’t study 4 years to learn how to count tablet, mind you.

British National Formulary (BNF)- the pharmacist’s ‘bible’

In the UK, pharmacists play a more important role than back here. In fact, they are the first line health professions whom patients turn to when they have minor ailments. If it turns out to be something serious, the pharmacist will refer him to a general practitioner (just like how a GP refers a patient to a specialist). They do ward rounds by walking side by side with doctors, monitoring patients’ progress and giving valuable advice to doctors on matters concerning drugs.

I just read a magazine from the UK, pharmacists are increasingly called upon in the Accident and Emergency (A & E) Department. Their key areas of work include taking drug history of the patients as it has been documented that pharmacists are more accurate than doctors in taking drug history. Mind you, you need to know what the patients have been taking, what drug he is allergy to, so that you can start off with a suitable drug efficiently. This enables better judgments to be made by doctors about adjusting patients’ treatment on ward rounds since accurate drug histories are already known. Besides that, pharmacists also add any new medicine that are required to the drug chart, advise nurses on writing discharge medication forms and introduce guidelines for treating illnesses and infections in the A & E department.

This is not to say they are superior than doctors; doctors are experts in diagnosing illness, but pharmacist are experts in drugs- they are more well-versed with the adverse effects of drugs, especially those that are newly marketed, drug interactions (how one drug may cancel the effect of the other), alternatives (if the hospital runs out of this drug, there is another brand that can replace it, with the same efficacy).

So you see, there is a mutual respect that makes it possible for pharmacists and doctors to complement each other in the provision of healthcare.

In the US, a student studies 6 years and is awarded a ‘Doctor of Pharmacy’, NOT a mere ‘Bachelor of Pharmacy’ or ‘Masters of Pharmacy’ for their first degree.

Upon entering university, I realized that pharmacy is NOT as easy as we all think it is. Who says only people who get rejected from Medicine turn to Pharmacy? Did you all know that if you don’t get at least a 3.9 out of 4.0 for your STPM, don’t even DREAM of applying pharmacy to local university. In Singapore, you must have performed well in you’re A levels to be able to apply for Pharmacy (it is not written but it is a well-known fact). This goes to show how competitive the pharmacy course is. There is a guy in my university whom I look up to; he did Optometry in a local university for one year as his family had financial problem then. Recently he entered IMU to pursue his dream- to be a pharmacist; even though he had spent one year studying Optometry.

As Pharmacy students, we all have to learn human anatomy and physiology like what the medical students are learning, the difference is, we do not have to learn every single nerves and blood vessels; we do not learn how to perform CPR and clinical examination. However, we do learn things that the future doctors do NOT learn. We go really in-depth as far as pharmacology is concerned, Natural Products in Medicine, Pharmaceutical Organic Chemistry (did you know that ephedrine for treating hypertension is extracted from the plant ephedra, known as Ma Huang in chinese?),  (properties of the drugs, nature of each class of organic family). We even learn what the future mechanical engineers are learning-rheology (the science of flow properties, viscosity), Physical Pharmacy- thermodynamics, rate equations, stability testing whereby contact angle, half-life, forces all come in). Why do we go through all these troubles?

 

Syrups made during Pharmaceutics lab session.

 

It is all because we need to lay a sound foundation-we need to know how the drugs are metabolized and eliminated in the body (hence the half-life), we need to know how long a drug formulated can last (hence the shelf-life and expiry date), we need to know how stable a suspension like your Calamine Lotion is before the particles get sedimented and affects the efficacy of the product. So you see, it is definitely MORE than counting tablets.

 

I must say I quite like the way IMU structures the course (though I do NOT like the workload, class tests and high quality of exams papers). We have problem-based learning (PBL) like the medical students too. In each PBL, we are given a clinical trigger, whereby we all discuss in a small group of 8 on the learning issues.

For example, a man is presented with chest pain while he is gardening; he is 56 years old and often drinks. So we all concluded that he is having angina pectoris (chest pain)- then we divide the learning issues to pathophysiology (how the disease comes about), risk factors(what can cause it), drug treatment (what classes of drugs used to cure or improve the condition), signs and symptoms, complications (if he goes untreated-what is the worst case scenario?) as well as lifestye modifications (advise him to quit or cut down on drinking and smoking, do more exercise, eat a balanced diet). In the next session, each of us will present our findings-using powerpoint, charts, mahjong paper or whiteboard.

We also have portfolio to do-whereby we are given 5 issues like Hypertension, Leukaemia, Atheroma with clinical triggers to guide us in our research. Later we have to write up on that topic, not forgetting to cite references.

Future pharmacists working in lab. More posts coming up on what future pharmacists do in uni^_^

So all these sessions go a long way towards helping us students develop a STUDENT CENTRED learning attitude, instead of the conventional spoon-feeding method that we all grew up with.

After all these, do you still think that pharmacist is the girl who counts tablet behind the counter? ^_^

 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.