What do pharmacists do?
I know pharmacists dispense medication and find any prescription errors I’m just confused as to why they have to go through 8 years of school to do that. I was recently able to shadow a pharmacist and it seems as if the computer will alert the pharmacist if a medication prescription has an error in it. It also seems like the pharmacy techs are also able to count pills and because the computer flags any prescription errors the pharmacy tech could probably also fix any errors.
However I’m sure pharmacists do more than what I saw in my couple of hours of shadowing I’m just not sure what else they do. It would be kind of messed up if they went through 8 years of school just to count pills and have a computer do the rest so I imagine a pharmacist has responsibilities that goes beyond that.
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My brother is a pharmacist and I wish he was here to answer this!
But while pharmacists do sometimes do “bot like” work (although that’s more frequently assigned to pharmacy techs), in large part they’re there to understand how drugs work at a level that an MD *doesn’t*.
For instance, an MD might prescribe a drug that has a terrible interaction with another drug a patient is taking…or is counter indicated for a condition that patient has. The pharmacist’s job is to catch this before it can harm the patient. (Which takes a phenomenal level of understanding of what a wide variety of drugs do – both on their own and in conjunction with other drugs and human biochemistry.)
So it’s not just, “the physician ordered 500 mg of this when 50 mg is the highest dose a human should take”. It’s also, “this patient has liver failure, so giving them this drug might kill them” (which the doctor either might not have known because many doctors treat each part of their patient as a separate thing without considering the whole – or might have known, just didn’t know that this was a bad drug for people with failing livers because even an MD only knows so much).
(FWIW, my brother regularly has to call doctors to be like, “WTF? This medication will kill this patient!” That’s particularly true in cases where a patient has a number of illnesses and is on multiple drugs.)
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