Terra Sigillata

Long ago in a place far away, I was a full-time pharmacy professor. I love pharmacy students, almost as much as I love medical and nursing students. But, to me, pharmacy students were special because they would one day be the frontline health professional seen first by the majority of the public.

I took very seriously my responsibility to share with my students every known mechanism of drug action, why some drugs were better than others, and how some drugs interacted with others. I credit my pharmacy students with encouraging to develop my interest in herbal medicines, sifting the wheat from the chaff, and helping them become better patient educators and consumer advocates.

But, there were always a few students at the back of the lecture hall who looked at me with cocked heads or raised eyebrows when they knew what I was saying was the truth, but not exactly reality when it came to the modern practice of pharmacy. Among the smartest students in the class, these men and women were most responsible for my real education as a pharmacy professor; those who kept me in touch with the realities of how pharmacy, particularly community pharmacy, operated outside the confines of the ivory tower.

I could swear that one of those students was The Angry Pharmacist.

The Angry Pharmacist is one of a very small handful of practicing pharmacists who writes a blog, most often to blow off steam, about having to interact with "the public" and our wonderful industrial health insurance complex.

All pharmacy students, or those contemplating pharmacy as a career, should read the Angry One's 24 October manifesto.

Like The Angry Pharmacist, I share displeasure with the disconnect between pharmacy education and reality, even in the days before the profession shifted from a bachelor's degree to an entry-level doctoral degree (we now have even more over-educated and overqualified professionals with greater student loan balances paying for the need of revenue-starved state universities to justify their pharmacy programs).

There are others, such as the DrugNazi, but The Angry Pharmacist gets my seal of approval for telling it like it is, even when the truth is vulgar and ugly.