Thursday, April 3, 2008

An Open Letter to my Pharmacy School

Please quit sending me emails about the veterinary therapeutics course. Last I checked, it was illegal for non-vets to prescribe medications for non-human animals. What, exactly, is the point of studying how to treat diseases in animals when animals are considered to be outside both our scope of practice and the scope of practices of physicians we work with? In my state, at the bare minimum, pharmacists aren't even allowed to sub brand-generic on vet prescriptions. What's the point?

I will note that I get a lot of calls from a local vet's office when I'm at work, but most of the time the questions being asked are about drug product availability; sometimes pet meds come in dosages or concentrations that human meds don't, and it can be difficult to approximate the doses. My cat's bladder infection was treated with what amounted to an Augmentin 50 mg/5 mL suspension; the least concentrated form available for humans is 200 mg/5 mL, so trying to dose the cat would've been practically impossible considering that she was getting about one milliliter of the stuff anyway. And I feel really bad for the family at our pharmacy who apparently splits the tiny-ass 2.5 mg Norvasc tablets in half.

Actually, the most confusing veterinary puzzle is the cat who uses an albuterol inhaler. If I ever see the owner at the store I'm going to ask how in the world that works.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They make a spacer for cats:
http://maxshouse.com/inhalation_therapy_for_airway_disease.htm

N.B. said...

Whoa. That solves a long-puzzling mystery. I figured it was something like that, but I imagine getting a cat to hold still long enough to submit to any sort of inhaler use--spacer or no--must be fairly tricky.

Anonymous said...

Hi

It is a very nice and good post and I really impressed to it.

Anonymous said...

Hi
It is a very good and great post and I like it.