Developing a personal relationship with your pharmacist can yield many important benefits, especially if you take numerous medications. Here's why you should get to know this "underutilized resource."
Do you know your pharmacist’s name? If you don’t, that’s one of several questions you might want to ask. A survey commissioned by the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) found that people who know their pharmacists by name also tend to keep their pharmacists up to date on all the medications they take, read the labeling information on their prescriptions, know the active ingredients of their medications, and more often ask their pharmacists questions about their medications.
The survey suggests that for many of us, pharmacists remain an underutilized resource. In fact, 58% of people who responded to the survey said they hardly ever or never asked their pharmacists questions.
Pharmacists oversee the proper dispensing of your medications. They are also experts on pharmaceuticals and, ideally, strive to provide you with comprehensive “pharmaceutical care.” This concept means that they know about the chemical composition of drugs, how they function in the body, the conditions that various drugs are generally used to treat, how drugs are absorbed and metabolized by the body, common side effects of drugs, and worrisome interactions between them. It requires at least five years of study and clinical experience with patients to become a pharmacist.
Pharmacists can help ensure that you get the most benefit from your prescriptions. Certainly your personal physician can and should advise you about your drugs; but your pharmacist, the APhA emphasizes, is “one of the most accessible members of the health care team.” The medication issues that a pharmacist can help you with include:
- The potential for harmful interactions between your prescription medications and over-the-counter drugs, dietary/herbal supplements, foods, or alcohol
- Negative side effects you are most likely to encounter when taking medications, and what you can do about them
- Activities that might be a problem while you take certain medications (for example, some drugs put you at higher risk for sunburn or heat exhaustion, requiring you to take extra care during the warm months)
- What you should do if you miss a dose
- How to store your medications so that they retain their potency
- Ways you might be able to cut your medication costs, such as switching to a generic
- How to take drugs properly if they are not in pill form, such as inhalers, skin patches, and nose and eyedrops
- Advice about over-the-counter medications
