What is the significance of 1/11/11 other than it's a whole bunch of 1's (just wait until november this year)? Is there some superstitious story to it? about luck?
Anyway, it was the second day of class today, and I found it tough to sit through it with my utmost attention. It was only the second day of class, and I fell asleep during break immediately, which left me feeling very groggy throughout the lecture afterward. guah
I want to list some kinds of pharmacists there are out there that I can go into (but I have absolutely no idea where I want to end up) because sometimes I get myself confused with "what does a pharmacist do?" Here goes, a (short) list:
Academia
Alternative Therapeutics
Anticoagulation Therapy
Army
Chemical Dependency
Clinical Transplantation
Community Pharmacy (Chain, Independent)
Compounding
Consultant
Distribution
Geriatrics
Health Systems Pharmacy
Home Health Care
Hospice
Hospital (Inpatient, Outpatient, Ambulatory)
Immune Disorders (AIDS)
Industry
Infectious Disease
Nuclear Pharmacy
Nutrition Support
OB/GYN
Oncology
Pain Management
Pediatric Oncology
Pediatrics
Pharmacology
Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM)
Poison Control
Psychiatric Pharmacy
Sleep
Surgery
Regulatory
Veterinary
Doesn't it look like a MD can go into many of those various fields as well? Well, we are dealing with medications, which is where doctors and pharmacists overlap. The one day I went to yoga class back home, I met an older lady who was a nurse at Kaiser, and she told me that Kaiser is changing the some of work the medical team is doing. Pharmacists rather than nurses are taking over the role of giving screenings to patients and talking to patients about their health, so what will nurses be in charge of doing? Interdisciplinary medicine is complicated because of how the professions were built up in the past. What are we striving toward?
Too bad you didn't post at 11:11pm, hehe.
ReplyDeleteDo you prefer any of the types of pharmacy jobs on your list?
Interesting, the Kaiser stuff. I guess it makes sense considering that there always seems to be a nurse shortage... The nurses can focus on other responsibilities if the pharmacists take over these tasks, and thus a more efficient medical team :).
I'm still very much interested in alternative medicine (Chinese herbs mainly), but more interested in the whole idea of taking into account the entire body's systems rather than just the one part that's problematic because everything is connected. That's why we get side-effects. Also, I don't believe that just taking medications is enough to "cure" the body. A person's lifestyle just may affect the body as much as some toxin. I kind of want to own a clinic, but I'm not sure about it yet (I'll see if I like hospitals or not). I'm not very business-y and really can't handle money all that well. haha I haven't really found my passion in anything, so I'm still open to everything out there. It makes it hard to show a motivated interest in a specific job.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of nurses, I think of caretakers in a hospital, which I doubt is their main job. So, having the duty to screen patients for diseases may be something important that nurses feel make them valuable to the health care team. I don't know though. I hear a lot about pharmacists and physicians working together on a patient, but not so much about nurses and pharmacists. I also hear a lot about clashes between the professions... superiority-type of things -,-"