When you are handed a prescription by your physician or your pharmacist there are many questions you should know the answer to before walking out the door.
1. What is this medication for?
This may seem obvious, but countless times when I ask a patient if they know what their prescription is for they tell me they have no idea. When someone doesn’t know what a medication is for, there is little motivation to take it correctly or …
I had a patient once. Her name was Alice (not her real name). Alice was in her mid-thirties, diabetic, had chronic pain, high blood pressure and was an alcoholic. She lived on Kuper Island which was just a short ferry ride from the small pharmacy I managed in Chemainus, British Columbia. Alice would come in every month or so to see me for her medication, go over her blood sugar results, take her blood pressure. …
It’s been five years since she was told she was cancer free. Today she was told it was back, and the future was quite grim.
My job was to make sure she understood how to properly take the medication that would reduce the swelling around the tumor so radiation could start as soon as possible.
That was my job. Clinically speaking it wasn’t the most challenging or difficult issue of the day as I …
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