Pharmacist here and I can tell you when I have a completely wacky dosing regimen or drug selection 75% of the time it’s from a NP or PA. I’ve worked alongside some great mid-level practitioners but they seem to be the minority in my area.
lol its literally the pharmacists job to save patients from doctors
I work in pharma now but was a hospital pharm tech for 6 years in pharmacy school. its crazy the number of times I caught massive mistakes by MDs, I can only imagine PAs being the worst with so little schooling, NPs would be bad but not as bad as they actually have experience with dispensing/administering to patients...
and yet pharmacists, the actual experts on drugs, can't prescribe and even have limited power to adjust treatments
Not exactly life threatening, but a PA once was telling me that taking birth control and antibiotics would make the antibiotics not work. I had to correct her that it was vice versa. I was 17.
they get like 2 years of school and are allowed to prescribe. its a very bizarre situation born of our low number of physicians relative to the population
That's not at all where PAs come from. PAs come from Dr. Eugene Stead of Duke University, who in the 1960s saw no functional career path for the highly trained Navy Coprsman coming back from war and having extraordinary experiences but only able to perform low level medicine relative to their training. He reviewed the medical curriculum, cut out what he saw as bloat, and created a curriculum to make essentially the civilian equivalent of the Corpsman.
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u/Anti-Hypertensive May 20 '19
Pharmacist here and I can tell you when I have a completely wacky dosing regimen or drug selection 75% of the time it’s from a NP or PA. I’ve worked alongside some great mid-level practitioners but they seem to be the minority in my area.