The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

I've been working with a "new" pharmacist since February. He's from India, and got his pharmacist license a while ago, but was working as a technician for a while because of work visa/international degree issues or something. So, technically, he's only been "practicing" as a pharmacist for a short while and boy howdy does it show.

For starters, he asks me all sorts of questions which I feel is inappropriate for a pharmacist to ask a technician. Example, the other say he was remarking about the alcohol content of one of our liquid prescription cough medications. The doctor had written for 4 teaspoonfuls at a time, which was a lot, and he asked me if at 7% per teaspoon if the overall alcohol dose would be too high. Um, I HAVE NO IDEA. I'm NOT a pharmacist. This is the sort of thing a pharmacist is SUPPOSED to know! This is exactly the reason why pharmacists get paid four times more than I do: to answer these sorts of questions. Granted, I have been a technician for over ten years and in that time I have learned things. But when it comes down to someone asking "is this dose of "drug x" or "ingredient x" to high?", I am not the one to ask. This question would get immediately deferred to the pharmacist. So the fact that I'm working with a pharmacist who thinks it's okay to deffer these questions to ME is pretty uncomfortable.

Also, he had never heard of the abbreviation MSIR before. In case you don't know, it stands for Morphine Sulfate Immediate Release. I explained this to him. He understood how that worked as an acronym, but needed further evidence because it's a CII narcotic and he needed me to "prove" it to him. Finally, we managed to look it up in an old medication database as an outdated brand name of morphine which is no longer manufactured but doctors still use as a notation. It was 20 minutes worth of work on a prescription that any other pharmacist would have glanced at and known it was acceptible.

Now these are just a couple of specific examples. Every day I work with this guy comes with a barrage of questions about dosing, doctors, corporate policy, and pharmacy law. In other words, a great deal of things I am not really qualified to answer.

In other news, the idea of alcoholism is starting to look attractive.