Shameless plug indeed (Pharmageeky But Maybe Sorta Cool Shirts). I kinda had some ideas for pub crawl shirts back in the day (I sound old saying that right?) but the ones that were eventually made mostly seemed to suck. So as a delayed creative outlet and way to make a couple of bucks (literally, it ain’t much) I’ve designed my own pharmacy themed shirts available to anyone.
The weird video gaming antiquities that turn up never cease to amaze me. This one is an early 90s PC point and click style adventure game. ‘Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist’ is a game where you play as the title character who owns a pharmacy in the old west and keeps his past life a secret…yes, it’s as strange as it sounds. I read that this came about when one of the game’s creators tried to say frontier and rancher quickly and somehow spat out a word that sounded like pharmacist, so that’s the direction it went.
It’s great that our inner geek enjoys learning about the strange ways in which some of the medications on our shelf have come about, but customers might not necessarily get the same kick out of it as we do.
Some of the more chattier of us when counseling might go into a little too much detail about the medication we are talking about. We might be encouraged by the patient’s curiosity and questions that we might find ourselves letting them know some unnecessary information into the production process of their cute lil pink tablet. Warfarin is one where I’ve heard someone mention to the customer that it came from rat poison, or basically is rat poison. While that’s kinda interesting for us, it isn’t very reassuring to the patient. If they already haven’t heard that about warfarin, and many people have, their next question is how does it work as a rat poison, to which you say “well the rats basically bled out etc….now please have this tablet with your lunch. Right-o then, off you go, enjoy.” (more…)
