The Cycles of Abuse in Pharmacy

It goes like this in any family: father beats and belittles son. Son beats and belittles his son. That son will do the same.

Pharmacy is a small family. Numbering 220,000 nationwide, the pharmacy family is an unhappy, dysfunctional one with a few success stories. You've got your grandparents, the old-timey BS in Pharm that were taught to memorize what the pills look like in school---the most gentile and, unfortunately, useless folk. Then you have the various aunts and uncles you never see, the ones that work retail, or maybe part-time or maybe nevertime, and they pretty much represent the profession of hard laborers. Then there are the varieties and varieties of children, us. New pharmacists and soon-to-be pharmacists.

The soon-to-be pharmacists have been cracked on the head with humiliation by their preceptors and bosses throughout school. It might be wide-spread in health care in general, as I always hear horror stories about what medical interns and residents deal with for actually, much longer than pharmacy students. Pharm interns have had their souls suckled on by chain pharmacies, paying them a technician's pittance to basically do everything but electronically verify the actual prescription, while taking a confidence beating by patients and especially middle and upper management. Maybe it's just my experience of it?

This is where the dichotomy begins: all the pharmacy children of the family are sent off to the "real world". You've got the ones that become massively successful, that is, making a living off of something other than retail, and they are seen as the avuncular successful cool family members that bring a fun demeanor to your Thanksgiving dinner, and buy the best presents for you at Christmas. Then you have straight-ahead domestic types, the ones that somehow adjust their personality properly to survive, and they present at your family reunions as blending in, not loud or full of life or anything. Is there a third type? I think you're either a have (non-retail pharmacist) or a have-not (retail).

I pity my peers who have their sights set on retail. Hey, maybe I'm someone who is an easy target because my damn mouth is just open too much, but the retail life is that of a corporation holding against you that you're a pharmacist. They despise paying you what they pay you, they micro-manage your every move, dish drain the professionalism out of you, and nit pick the fucking daylights out of any remnant of a personality or soul you may have. My DM, for example, has typecasted me as a dumbass. He is a douche. Although he's an approximately 40 year old Vietnamese pharmacist, I'd classify him as the old timey style pharmacist, the "do as I say not as I do" type. He'd come into whatever store I'm working in, not say hi, and just instantly start complaining about something I'm doing or would go up to a computer and say "blah blah blah, we need to schedule you for such and such a thing...by the way I got a complaint about blah blah blah. And i heard you've been taking your paid breaks and lunches together to study...but you only work one day a week, so if you're needing to study on the one day a week you work, there might be some other problem we're dealing with here.." How about I just want to use my time alotted to me toward putting a dent in whatever work I need to get done for school since I'm still a student?

And, so the cycle goes. Preceptors are unpaid, but they get free labor. How do you get a preceptor to take your school's students? You say "Hey we'd like to place a student at your store...look at this this way, you get to have someone help you with your workflow! Work 'em however you want." How does this NOT encourage them to dump any resentful feelings they have about pharmacy onto this student? Here (the intern) is a shining example of what they used to be, and look, you get to exploit them for 60 hours per semester, and infect them with all the humiliation and negative reinforcement THEY dealt with as a student. A psychological change will occur in this student through their studies, becoming more callous and beastial to resemble their preceptor. They will see the cause and effect of trying to be "smart", of trying to bond more personally with their preceptor, and of thinking that pharmacy can be anything other than one of the least respected professions this side of Timbuktu.

I had a preceptor in a specialty internship (paid) that I did over the summer who is 2 years out of pharmacy school. He started out as the goofiest, friendliest preceptor I've ever had. Naturally, I felt very at ease to be goofy myself, and I clung on to his warped sense of humor as a sign that maybe normal people with a free spirit sometimes inhabit the pharmacy profession. However, my comfort was soon squandered when it seemed to irk him when I recounted that I was talking about going to the ocean and mountains during my weekends while he was working overnighters (a mistake in hindsight on my part). With the dramatic and cliquey atmosphere at work, and me not understanding the politics at play, he soon started showing some signs of wanting to keep me at bay. Instead of challenging me with intellectual questions and allowing me the freedom to explore the specialty in books, on the internet, and by visiting hospitals to see radioactive medicines being utilized, he tried to get me to do more routine tasks such as cleaning. He tried making filling out a routine form look really interesting, and I feigned interest at first, but became really bored, and I began to crack. The shit hit the fan when I asked him if I could make a slide show about the specialty, and he took me aside and said, if he could, he'd fail me because I don't do what I'm told, and this was in response to his boss saying that it would be ok to make that slide show because then the company wouldn't have to solicit students to work for them at my school, I could do it. He said he wasn't satisfied that I was doing enough work flow stuff---indeed preceptors don't like idle interns, but really it was because I asked his boss directly if I could because I needed some challenge, and that surprised him. Such a shameless, controlling baby he turned out to be. Funny how preceptors will say "how you act reflects on me"...no it fucking doesn't.

So, in pharmacy, management shits on pharmacists, patients shit on pharmacists, and pharmacists shit on pharmacists. Isn't there something wrong if schools are admitting students who buy into this? I have vowed to never belittle a pharmacy intern if I become a preceptor, but can I really promise that without having actually experienced what it feels like to work 40 hours a week living off the profession and dealing with the pressures of managing technicians and being the person who deals with complicated complaints?

American Pharmacists Month

There's a certain brainlessness widespread among pharmacy students---indicative of what they think they'll have to be like as an actual practicing pharmacist. This is at the crux of why things won't change at all in this profession.

Enter American Pharmacists Month:

There is an incredibly annoying facebook campaign going on right now spearheaded by UOP in which a new daily fact is copy and pasted from a list about pharmacists into facebook stati. Lots of my FB friends, many of whom I thought were smarter than this, all have the same picture posted (which says Know Your Medicine. Know Your Pharmacist.) and in tandem are posting the same thing as everyone else. Here's the thing: I've never subscribed to the "strength in numbers" tenet, but what is it about this portion of the population that makes them want to be just like each other? Do you guys really feel as empty as you act?

Don't get me wrong. I am proud of what line of work I'll be going into. I'm proud of the high earnings, and....um....the pay...Ok, maybe I'm a sellout. Because all I see is negativity. Horrible working conditions. Unnecessary stress. No rights to defend yourself from rude, ghetto customers. And an expectation that you won't ask for what you want, you will take what they give.

My friends, this is why pharmacy is the way it is: people who aspire to be pharmacists value money over thinking. Am I really to believe that these facebook status posters will still want to provide 'optimal patient care and oversee the patient's maximal therapeutic outcomes" after they actually learn what the reality is? Do they know the realities yet or are they really as naive as they act?