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Chronic Pain members - Welcome, please introduce yourself

Chronic Pain | Last Active: 2 hours ago | Replies (7051)

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@faithwalker007

It takes a pharmacist years of education and training to learn the different classes and medications and their MOAs — mechanisms of action— to assume, memorize, or wing it—is dangerous. Memorizing does not work because different drug classes work/don’t work with and interact with disease states, drugs, allergies, environments, and food. The only way to know how a particular drug affects any or all of these factors is knowing how the drug works on the body at the systemic and cellular if not atomic level and to do that you must know and understand its mechanism of action.
From there you can understand the class and defer the knowledge to the class with... caveats to the particular drug in question.
That’s why pharmacists have such extensive chemical, therapeutic, and biochemical knowledge.
It’s also why we’re called the GATEKEEPERS.

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Replies to "It takes a pharmacist years of education and training to learn the different classes and medications..."

As far as I 'm concerned, pharmacists are like doctors and I trust their knowledge of drugs more than doctors. You guys know a lot about diseases. Amazing! Sunny

@faithwalker007 The last pharmacist I had was a wonderful man from South Africa. I strongly suspect he had a different education, perhaps even a physician's degree, as his wealth of knowledge was astounding. He caught several things that my drs didn't. He guided me a lot in the early days of my rare kidney disease. On the other hand, my PCP freely used his apps to look up medications and interactions when we discussed things, to make sure he was accurate. I appreciated that he had not tried to "wing it" or "assume"; there is no way one human can keep all that information readily at hand in their mind!
Ginger