In a recent argument with a ‘mate’ of mine, former UCD Ents Officer Stephen Quinlivan, who said that my degree in pharmacy was a joke and that all that it amounts to is sitting in a shop and reading the piece of paper that the doctor gave to the customer and getting it off the shelf and giving it to them. He says why the fuck do you need to do a four year degree in order to read a bit of paper and give what it says to someone!
This sophistry employed in his attack can only be described as fucking criminal. His lack of understanding of the role of a pharmacist is a testament to his ignorance about the complicated nature of drugs and their interaction with each other and biological structures.
‘Oh but, it’s the doctor that knows about how the drugs work and then he makes that call.’ This was his pathetic attempt to respond to my point. Anyone who knows anything about medicine will know how potent some drugs are and how complicated the pattern of interactions between them is. I don’t know about you but, when it comes to my health it is always advisable to have more than one person looking out for anything that could be potentially damaging.
Doctors are not infallible, they have been known to miss things or make a mistake and the safety layer that is recognised in virtually every developed country is the pharmacist. This is always the pharmacist’s principle duty; to look at the prescription and consider the intricate and vast permutations of interactions and if we note anything contra-indicated we will contact the doctor and seek clarification.
Perhaps Mr Quinlivan is blessed by the fact that he has been lucky enough to not have been sick much in his life or to have a number of serious ailments at once or not to have a medical condition that means some drugs are not suitable for him and I could go on with the numbers of reasons that prescribing drugs is not as easy as he might believe.
One thing is sure though that Mr Quinlivan is lucky enough that he lives in a country where there is that protection afforded to people because one day he will get old, he will get sick, and he will be given medication and hopefully he will then realise that he feels comfortable when the doctor, who is a very busy person, spends three minutes with him then scribbles a load of words that he doesn’t understand onto a piece of paper and sends him on his way
. He will be happy to know that it’s not a trained monkey looking at that page and giving it to him. I know that he will be happy to know that the person looking at the page has spent a long time reading books the size of a house about chemicals that he can’t even pronounce and cares about if the words the doctor has written on the page are correct and accurate.
A pharmacist will spend the time explaining how to take medication. If he is stupid enough to think that he can get away his whole life popping aspirins when he feels a bit ill then he’s sadly mistaken. Anyone who has ever had to take strong pharmacological preparations will know that there are important rules about how and when to take them. Some have serious side effects that need to be explained.
He is again lucky that he is relatively intelligent, even if he thinks two diplomas makes a degree (B & L), therefore he can make an informed decision about his medication but there are a lot of people that rely on the pharmacist to explain in great detail the medicines that they are taking.
Prescribed medications are also not the only thing that we dispense. We provide very important first line information for patients. Our GPs and hospitals are over run with sick people, imagine the problems that would arise if all of those that came for minor medical advice to their local pharmacy had to go to the doctor. Our medical system as we know it would cease to be.
So when Mr Quinlivan ever makes his stupid argument to you about pharmacists look into his face and call him a fucking tool.
This article is supposed to be 1,000 words long and I was able to deal with Mr Quinlivan’s treatise in about 700 so I propose to spend the remainder telling you about girls that have nice boobs and know it. These kinds of people make me sick. They go around flaunting their tits in a look-at-me-type way. They know that they have nice tits but that’s not good enough for them, no, they want you to know that they have good boobs too.
Now I do enjoy boobs they occupy a lot of my personal thoughts during my alone time as well as other things that I won’t get into. Have you ever considered why it is ok to show as much of the boobs as possible as long as the nipple is covered? I think that that is the oddest thing of them all. It’s not as if nipples are my favourite part of a tit; I like tits as a whole. I don’t even know if they are my favourite body part–sometimes they are sometimes they are not. I am fickle like that.
