Leon Levy`s pharmacy in San Francisco has the air of an old-fashioned candy store. Yellow and blue boxes of pain relievers fight for shelf space with golden cough syrups and ruby mouthwashes. Levy himself seems like a throwback to a bygone era. He knows most of his customers by name and sometimes drops off prescriptions on his way home. When a woman walks up to the counter and describes a headache pounding behind her eyes, Levy listens patiently. ”It sounds like a sinus headache,” he tells her, and picks an over-the-counter decongestant off the shelf. ”Take two of these and put a hot towel on your forehead when you get home,” he says. ”If it doesn`t feel better after about 15 minutes, you`ll know it`s not sinus. Come back; we`ll figure something else out.”
Levy adjusts the glasses at the end of his nose and rings up the woman`s purchase. Above the cash register, a poster shows a bubble gum machine full of colored pills. It reads, ”If you think this is all your pharmacist does, think again.”
The poster is an attempt to thwart any perception that today`s pharmacists are glorified clerks who merely dole out drugs on doctors` orders. It`s true that pharmacists no longer spend their time mixing chemicals in their apothecaries. These days prescription drugs make up a $21.2 billion industry run by giant corporations, and most drugs come premixed and prepackaged.
But today`s pharmacists do much more than dispense the approximately 1.6 billion prescriptions doctors write every year; they provide a valuable service to the people who come to their counters, prescription slips in hand or questions on their minds.
Perhaps the best testimony to the importance of their role is a recent Gallup poll in which Americans judged pharmacists to be the nation`s most trustworthy professionals. For the third year in a row, they came in ahead of the clergy, lawyers, dentists-even doctors.
Why such a strong vote of confidence? ”We`re accessible,” says Roberta Armstrong, a pharmacist in Albion, Mich., who wears a button that says
”Before You Take It, Talk About It.” ”A lot of us work 10- to 12-hour days. You don`t have to wait an hour before we`ll talk to you. How many doctors can you say that about?”
What`s more, a pharmacist`s services come with another plus: ”We provide high-quality health information at no cost,” says Gary Holt, a professor of pharmacology at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. ”And you can consult a pharmacist any time the pharmacy`s open, with no appointment or receptionist. ”
A major part of his job today is doling out information, says Leonard
”Red” Camp, a pharmacist in Titusville, Fla. ”Twenty-five years ago, our major concern was that we give the right dose,” says Camp. ”Back then we`d respond to a patient`s request of `What is this?` with `What`d your doctor tell you it was?` No more.”
If the role of the pharmacist has changed, so has the world of drugs. Today`s physician has 400,000 prescription drugs at the tip of his pen. Whether you go to a small neighborhood independent like Levy`s or a chain like Walgreen`s, pharmacists deal with an immense range of substances and information. But even if the American public says it thinks highly of its pharmacists, that doesn`t mean people know what to expect from them. A recent survey by the National Consumers League showed that while 88 percent of Americans think of the drugstore fixtures in the white coats as their primary or secondary source of information about drugs, 43 percent of the respondents said they had not discussed their last prescription with their pharmacist.
”Consumers trust us,” says Armstrong, ”but too many of them still don`t know how to take advantage of what we offer.”
One of the most important services a pharmacist can provide is to maintain your full drug profile-a record of all your past prescriptions, along with information on any relevant health conditions you might have. Such a profile is not a family medical history, mind you, but a list of allergies, infections and disorders that could be aggravated by the drugs you take.
Most states require pharmacists to keep such profiles and to counsel you whenever you get a new prescription. And even in those states where the profiles aren`t required by law, many pharmacies maintain them anyway.
”Almost all pharmacists see keeping a profile and counseling as two of their primary duties to the patient,” says Arthur Kibbe, senior director of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
With a record on file in your pharmacist`s computer, you could go to a doctor while on vacation in Hawaii and have a pharmacist there call back to see if a new prescription will conflict with any drugs you`re already taking. Even more to the point, says Armstrong, drug profiles can help pharmacists catch mistakes. Prescribing errors do occur-many of them serious, some potentially lethal.
Pharmacists, in fact, know a good deal more about how drugs affect our bodies than most doctors. Physicians are required to take only one semester`s worth of drug-related courses in the average medical school curriculum;
pharmacists take at least three years` worth as part of their five-year program.
”We`re the medication experts,” says Armstrong. ”Customers should see us as a check and balance to what their physicians prescribe.” Leon Levy agrees. ”It`s not just a matter of putting pills in a bottle,” says Levy, standing at the counter of his old-fashioned pharmacy. ”I see myself as a health consultant.”
