List of things that make hospital pharmacists irate (formerly The Apathetic Pharmacist)

Friday, September 14, 2007

Rotation IX: Acute Care with Omniscience Personified.

So I really didn't know too much about this specific professor, Dr. P. The only thing I know about him is that he is very adamant his students know that when you have a cold, you burn roughly 7 calories per sneeze.

It turns out that he knows everything.

No, seriously, like, everything. It's creepy. Other faculty members I've been around, I really don't sense anything remotely close to omniscient....this guy, no, he actually may have memorized the entire contents of PubMed.

I was at first clued in on his stature as a clinical pharmacist when he was nominated to sit on the Pharmacy academy on the National Academies of Practice during the first week of my rotation. If you don't know what that is, it's kind of a big deal. Any time you are going to be added to a list of 28 or so elite people and the name Koda-Kimble is on the list, well, in pharmacy, you are hot shit.

So anyway, I got to work with this dude for a month. Suffice it to say, I am and remain blown away with the sheer amount of crap that he knows. He raises the bar too damn high. I can't ever even theoretically strive to one day become as good of a clinical pharmacist as this dude. It's not a good idea to put people who have only done this stuff for a few years with this dude. It's like me trying to learn basketball from Michael Jordan. Sure, watching him dunk is cool, but it won't help my slow, white ass...it just makes me feel useless.

Anyway, the rotation went well. I got to see first hand how little medical students know about drugs...again. I asked them about it. Turns out they only get 6 weeks of the stuff total in school. Yikes. From what I've seen, medical training seems to be more like a series of apprenticeships rather than actual school. They just learn about the drugs on rotations as they need to. Whereas pharmacy school is just a series of useless classes that involve things like memorizing telephone numbers of the local poison control centers and knowing what the transtheoretical theory of change is (My WVU peeps know what I'm talking about...)

Back on track...

Patient care is an interesting thing with me. Personally, I hate following patients and using guidelines to solve problems. It's just boring. Really boring. I guess I did a good enough of a job, they never threw back one of my recommendations as incredibly stupid or not the best course of action. If you use chemical classifications to describe drugs, it will confuse the common med rotatee like you wouldn't believe. Calling an ED drug a phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor will make them step back, pull out a PDA, look it up, then come back pretending like they knew what you were talking about the entire time. It actually quite humorous to watch.

My evaluation took the a slight deviation from normal. I was mildly chastised for not working hard enough and not caring...but with this guy, he realized I belong in Industry or in a lab somewhere and didn't hold it against me. He actually took over an hour to completely evaluate me...20 minutes of which was to try to convince me to go to graduate school and "use my talents." Eh...that's another 6 years. I'm thinking no. Especially because they hire PharmDs in industry, anyway. Why get another degree if my current degree should get me where I need to go?

Oh....and he also said I talk too fast and look like I'm about to fall asleep far too much. Par for the course.