Pharmacist ranting

Why should he work so hard to get him to take his Zocar. If you don’t wear those special mind bending glasses the pharm reps paint on your face when you look at the data, it doesn’t look so damned hot anyway. The NNT isn’t so great.

But I agree that this is a situation where the pharmacist ought not to say “stop taking it”–the symptoms aren’t emergent and the chances that it is the medicine is actually slim.

But why all the anger? Is their something about the internet that brings this out. The only time that I get that upset over someone else sabatoging my treatment is when PCP’s (it is never pharmacists and rarely specialists) either:

1. Fill out a psychiatric disability form for the patient whom I, the treating psychiatrist, have been denying one to because they will do better working and aren’t disabled. it goes downhill from there

and,

2. Pull the same stunt with the Zocor only with an antidepressant for a suicidal moderately to severly depressed patient who is highly somatic and thinks everything is a side effect of the antidepressant and who I worked with for months before agreeing to take it.

We all need to keep in mind that we don’t know what we don’t know and be circumspect about what advice we give.