General Discussion

I do know that there are research pharmacists, and I know a number of pharmacists who are executives, some at the C level, a pharmaceutical companies.

I actually don't believe that Doctors in many cases, are as aware of pharmacology as are pharmacists who have not forgotten what they learned in their educations.

Those educations should be treated with far more respect than they are in practice.

Unfortunately, if your day to day job involves counting pills and looking over the shoulders of techs to see that the label is correct, and taking calls from Doctor's offices, it is easy to forget that for which one has trained.

In my current medical adventure with aortic stenosis, after my testing, the group made a follow up appointment with a nurse practitioner who was good with cardiac anatomy, but who clearly did not understand etiology or pharmacology on a level I would have regarded as sufficiently well informed. She does have authority to write scripts. (For my next follow up, to see if the condition worsens to such a level as to require treatment, I'm changing groups and institutions, particularly because Penn medicine, a research institution, has an excellent reputation for valve replacement surgery, should I require it before dying from something else.

Our culture has elevated the physician, physicians assistant and/or nurse practitioner over pharmacists, which I think, in general is unwise. The inability to question physicians, to treat them like gods, is not good for patients, nor, in fact, for physicians themselves.