Will a PharmD help Combat the Nation’s Rising Prescription Drug Problem?
It has recently come to our attention how prevalent prescription drug habits have become around the nation. This is especially frightening because most of the time they lead to further drug dependencies, the greatest of which is heroin, an addiction which claims the lives of so many young people every year. While we remain aware of this problem, it is difficult to fight against it, since many teenagers continuously steal prescription drugs out of their parent’s medicine cabinets or make up ailments they do not have in order to receive painkillers. How do PharmDs fit into all this?
A PharmD is someone who can mix together this medication and hand it out to everyone with a prescription. While this seems like a relatively easy task, it does require years of schooling and many times, a knack to know when a patient is not a true sufferer. Most PharmDs go to school in order to work for a pharmacy company, and enjoy the day-to-day interactions with patients. However, PharmDs are the last people an addict will see on their way home from getting a prescription. It has therefore fallen on a PharmD graduate’s shoulders to be aware of what patients should be taken note of and which patients are simply chronic pain sufferers.
There are many sad stories that have infiltrated many news stories and documentaries – tales of young adults who began a dependency on dangerous pain killers at a young age, only to have their parents find them after a drug overdose. There are other stories of older adults who have become dependent on pain killers and have found doctors/pharmacists who will continue to prescribe this medication to them, despite the illegality of the situation. Amidst all these stories, the pharmaceutical industry remains a highly profitable area, and pharmacists take credit for much of this success in putting together each specific prescription.
However, despite the gloomy outlook many of these stories paint, there is always the optimistic hope that researchers with a pharmD will develop medication that does not have an addictive persona. These prescription drugs will be able to be delivered without any fear of a dependency occurring and without any side effects. We are nearing a stage in our societal development where this type of research is not unheard of, but will hopefully become routine. There have been too many news stories about the dangers of prescription drugs for us to sit around and do nothing. Pharmacists do not enroll in pharmD programs to help aid teenagers toward dependent drugs, but instead go to school to help cure people of their ailments. This type of illness is only the most recent in our modern society that we need to work together to combat.
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