4 ms·

Why is a pharmacist counseling patients? They go to doctors no?

• mechanical_fish 19y ago
  Sure, 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.