Comments on How to Really Piss off your Pharmacist

Recently there have been some comments on one of my earlier blog posts, How to Really Piss off Your Pharmacist. 

The negative comments are interesting. Here's one:

"You seem to left out the fact that YOU chose this profession, so stop whining. You do work for US...the customer! We don't particually like dealing with you either. Most pharmacists these days are rude and condensending..just like YOU are in this article! We get sick, have to wait WHILE we're sick and become sicker when you are rude and force YOUR crappy generics on us that YOU get kickbacks on.You Find the cheapest supplier, dole out the useless generics and insist the are exactly the same as brand drugs. OK, sure they are." [sic]

There are further comments (check this LINK if you want to read them) defending pharmacists, but my point with today's blog post is that as pharmacists we really do have a long, long road to overcome in terms of some patient perception. Obviously this person really thinks that we "force" generics on patients and get "kickbacks" for doing so. I checked my mail just yesterday and my kickback check still isn't there, unfortunately. As far as "forcing" generics, any pharmacist will tell you what a joke that statement represents.

The long road is why hundreds of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians read blog posts like this one -- because they understand. They live with nonsense every day. There's a huge disconnect between how a pharmacy really operates and how the patient thinks it happens, otherwise we wouldn't make these statements or identify with them. 

Pharmacists are generally viewed as ethical, trustworthy people. Obviously we still have some people who have some unusual issues, but with time we'll overcome that too.