And why pharmacists make so much money? And why do they have to go to school for so long?
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A. They don’t. They have common stuff for the area. They order in a standard stock of a lot of generic stuff. If your dr prescribes something extremely rare/specific, they will have to order it in for you.
B. Because they go to school for so long. And have your life in their hands, more so then your DR.
C. They need to understand the reactions between every drug group, what mixes will kill you, what doses will kill you, what drug will stop another drug working, what drug will mix with another drug to create unwanted side effects.
I would take the advice of a pharmacist over a general dr in regards to medication any day of the week. They are much more knowledgeable about drugs then most doctors ever will be.
1. Because the vast majority of people are on the same kind of medicines: blood pressure pills, statins for their heart, antidepressants, diabetes drugs like metformin, sleep pills, pain pills, thyroid pills, birth control, antibiotics, etc.
2. They make a lot of money because it requires a lot of education, provides a life-saving service, and is extremely high risk and high responsibility. If they screw up, it could cost someone their lives.
3. They go to school for so long because they have to learn about a lot of incredibly complex topics in order to do their jobs well: microbiology, organic chemistry, anatomy, physiology, etc.
A lot of medications are common and they can be stocked like grocery staples. This lets pharmacies predict, to an extent, the demand for medications and have them on hand.
According to [The (U.S.) Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/pharmacists.htm), pharmacists have a median income of $128,570 per per year. That’s factoring in different areas and costs of living, as well as first year and thirtieth year pharmacists, so the range is more $75,000 to $150,000+. Depending on where you live, $75,000 is pretty good, or just decent. It’s not going to go as far in New York or California as it will in Georgia or Michigan or somewhere else. Whether that’s “so much money” is going to vary based on one’s own perspectives of course.
They spend a lot of years in school, as being a pharmacist is generally a doctoral degree, implying 8+ years of secondary education — and all the school debt to go with it. If you didn’t pay them well, nobody would want to do it.
They spend all those years in school because among other things, people come in with multiple prescriptions from different doctors. The pharmacist needs to make sure one doctor’s prescription won’t kill you or have other adverse effects when it interacts with another. The pharmacist may also be working in clinical setting such as hospital or outpatient treatment program to help the doctor choose appropriate medications based on the patient’s goals — and again, what combinations of drugs might or might not be safe or effective together.
One doctor doesn’t necessarily know what another doctor has prescribed you, so even at your local pharmacy, the pharmacist has to be aware of these things. Yes, they have computer programs that can check on this, but you still need a person to understand the reports and explain it to the layperson.
These answers reflect my experience as a pharmacy technician but some of my claims may not be true in every state.
TL;DR: 1) pharmacies don’t have every medication they need on the shelves all the time. It’s not uncommon for a patient to have to wait a day for an uncommon medication. 2) certain tasks in a pharmacy can only legally be completed by a pharmacist so they make the big bucks and 3) pharmacists are highly specialized doctors. This is another reason they make the big bucks and why they spend so long in school.
How do pharmacies always have the medications in stock? – We don’t but we get shipments from our suppliers daily. Anything that’s common and cheap we keep big bottles in stock and order more when we’re running low. For less common or expensive brand-name medications we either order it only when a new script comes in (the medicine gets filled the next day instead of the day the script was written) or we only keep a single open bottle on the shelf which is leftover from an earlier script. Medications expire so we do our best to make sure the least amount of medicine is expiring on our shelves.
Why do pharmacists make so much? – there are tasks in a pharmacy that only the pharmacist can legally do. Without a pharmacist on site the pharmacy comes to a halt. Any technician can be trained to fetch bottles and use a pill counting machine, but each filled script has to be double-checked by the pharmacist before it can rung out for the patient. There are questions that only the pharmacist is knowledgeable enough to answer. If a patient asks me what they should take if they feel sick after a vaccine, I can’t say “you should take Tylenol or Motrin” because I’m not a trained medical professional but the pharmacist can absolutely say that. I’d have to say “the pharmacist has been recommending Tylenol or Motrin to most patients” because it’s a statement of fact and not my opinion. When we order medications the task is completed by a technician, but any medications classified as CII (C2) by the FDA (drugs with a high potential for abuse: amphetamines, opioids, and the like) require the pharmacist to sign off on the order.
Why do they have to go to school for so long? They’re basically highly specialized doctors who focus on how medications affect the body. They need to understand the human body just as well as doctors do and they need to know how different classes of medications interact with the body, what medications can be dangerous when taken together, and they need to be able to catch doctor’s mistakes. Did you know certain diabetes medications can lead nutrient deficiencies? I didn’t know until I heard the pharmacist explaining it to a patient. Do I know which diabetes medications can lead to nutrient deficiencies? No. I’m not a pharmacist and so I’m not qualified to answer this question.
Made me think: does anyone have a reference or source list of the most commonly prescribed medications in the US? Meaning, what would your standard pharmacy almost always have on hand or on order?
Pharmacists of Reddit – I’d even be curious for your anecdotal reports.
They don’t. I have had a couple issues lately with the medication I needed being out of stock and having to wait for it to come in. I also had another medicine that almost no one in my area was taking (I assume) because I always got a text every month having me verify I needed it again so they could have it in stock.
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