| My SIL is a pharmacist. She took four semesters of pharmacology -- med students take one semester. She's also saved my dad's life twice by recognizing extremely unusual allergic reactions to medications (and their ingredients).
I'm on some pretty serious medications and SIL knows how they interact and what I should look out for MUCH better than my oncologist. Even my internist tells me to check with the pharmacist for interactions when she gives me something new.
In many parts of the country, pharmacists are in seriously short supply -- which means that employers are willing to pay more. SIL gets recruited by competitors all the time!
But I bet the folks complaining about pharmacists are the same ones who begrudge my SIL getting off her feet for 10 minutes out of a 10+ hour shift to wolf down a sandwich (since part of the Corporate America that runs pharmacies also seem to believe that pharmacists are just pill pushers) rather than jumping to fill their script.
The reason scripts take 20 minutes to fill is that the pharmacist is often on the phone with your insurance company trying to convince the non-health care professional on the other end of the line to get your drugs authorized. And woe to the pharmacist who can't account for every freakin' pill in the building. Drug audits are a special form of H%$#. |