5 ms·
A joke it may be, but not a particularly funny one.
by aneesh 19y ago
A joke it may be, but not a particularly funny one.
- amichail 19y agoYou seriously think anyone on Hacker News would consider a career as a pharmacist? I mean maybe a software engineer/researcher in bioinformatics, but a pharmacist?!
- tjr 19y agoWhy not? Most of my work and education has been in software, but I am also a professional musician, an avid photographer, and have significant interests in linguistics, politics, U.S. history, and education. One of the funnest jobs I've ever had was scoring open-ended essays written by grade-school students. I don't see why a programmer couldn't develop an interest in pharmaceutical work.
- amichail 19y agoFrom wikipedia: "In their traditional role, pharmacists typically take a request for medicines from a prescribing health care provider in the form of a medical prescription and dispense the medication to the patient and counsel them on the proper use and adverse effects of that medication. In this role, pharmacists ensure the safe and effective use of medications." Sounds like fun.
- kyro 19y agoI hope you don't make your career decisions based on Wikipedia excerpts. There are pharmacists that work in ICU's (Intensive Care Units) and hospital departments as part of teams where they play a pretty significant role and interact with surgeons and other doctors. They are the go to individuals when it comes to drug compatibility and whether a patient can withstand a specific drug. I've seen it first hand, and it looks far from boring, not to mention the fact that in the end, they're working to help increase the quality of people's lives.
- amichail 19y agoWhat exactly do they do that can't be done by a computer? I would expect a computer to be more reliable than a pharmacist's memory.
- mechanical_fish 19y agoYou would have a computer counsel patients? You would have a computer ask people to describe the side effects they've been experiencing, and ask probing questions to evaluate how serious those side effects really are, and which of their two dozen drugs might be causing them, and which drugs might be usefully discontinued or substituted and which might not? You would have a computer decide whether or not the patient's phone call, complaining that their latest drug isn't as effective as usual, warrants a call to their primary-care physician? You would assign important decisions about your medical care to the sole discretion of a Java program written by a committee of outsourced developers that don't know or care any more about pharmacy than, say, you? It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience with serious illness. Congratulations, and may you remain healthy for as long as possible!
- omouse 19y agoWhy is a pharmacist counseling patients? They go to doctors no?
- mechanical_fish 19y agoSure, but in the USA you might have to wait a couple weeks or a month to see a doctor, at which point you might get about 10 minutes of their time. Unless you're Bill Gates, of course. Also, people have multiple doctors, who prescribe multiple things... often using handwritten notes. There's no standard for medical records exchange, and if there is half the doctors aren't using it, so the receptionists tend to hand you a questionnaire and ask you for the names of all your drugs. If you fill out that form wrong... well, let's just say that the pharmacist may be one of the few people with an up-to-date, accurate, computerized list of what you've been taking. For my elderly relatives, each of whom is taking a veritable salad of drugs, I just carry a sheaf of the pharmacy's printouts and copy them directly onto the questionnaires. And, in practice, people ask medical questions of whoever is in front of them at the time.
- inklesspen 19y agoThat's kind of insulting to all the pharmacists that help keep people healthy worldwide, don't you think?
- rudyfink 19y agoI agree. So much h8 for pharmacists. It must be all that standing above others that creates this.