Knowledge of Drugs: Pharmacists vs. Doctors

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MinaJoon

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Do doctors have less, more, or the same level of knowledge of drugs as pharmacists do?

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Seriously?

PharmD = Doctor of Pharmacy

M.D. = Doctor of Medicine

There's a reason we're called the medication experts...
 
When it comes to medications, Pharmacists are superior. When it comes to diagnosis, physicians are superior. They both need each other to function efficiently.
 
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I think we've had this conversation recently... What we decided is below.

So, for the most part, pharmacists know more than doctors about drugs. But a doctor in a specialty most likely knows more about the drugs to treat the conditions in his/her specialty than a pharmacist without a specialty.

But a pharmacist with a certain specialty knows more about the drugs that treat/manage that specialty than doctors, most likely the doctors in that specialty, too. It's the pharmacist's job to be an expert on medicines.

This is general, though. Everyone's knowledge and specialties are slightly different. One part of a medical team may have read a paper the night before on some new treatment that no one else on the team has read yet.
There's a lot of info in the science/medical world, and no one can know it all.
 
I think the bigger deal is that the pharmacist is supposed to understand the interactions across broad ranges of medications and their effects on other meds, foods, and conditions. An MD will likely know about food/drug, drug/dz, and drug/drug intxns within his area of concentration, but the pharmacist SHOULD be able to go outside of that and discuss intxn in other dz states, and meds that treat other dz states. Since many people are treated for multiple chronic illnesses with acute episodes in between this knowledge is key. Some MDs will have less than satisfactory understanding of this, others more. Same can be said of pharmacists. I have classmates that want to get their pharmD just to count fives on trays and 0's on paychecks. It's quite sad.
 
One big difference I can see here is that doctors have the benefit of really discussing and assessing how different medications are working for their patients (Describing retail - in hospital, pharmacists would have access to labs and charts). So the pharmacist should obviously know more about the medications but the doctor may notice through his/her experiences that one drug of a certain class may seem to be more effective than another in the same class. And seriously don't we have enough PPI's?!? :rolleyes:
 
pharmacists get a lot more training in school on this than M.D.s/DO.s but after that it depends on what a pharm or physician does to further their knowledge
 
This thread reminds me of a t-shirt I saw when I was visiting the UCSF CoP.

"I had 8 semesters of pharmacology, your physician had 1 - Who do you trust?"
 
don't MD's have less than a year of pharmacology. Docs do it as a learn as you go sort of thing. My friends doc would pull out a little notebook and run down the list of "ailments" and "drug recommended" haha
 
1 semester... So yea, less than a year.

Varies by school. Though I've heard 1 semester most frequently. However they tend to get 2 years of PBL followed by residencies, both of which provide OJT, and there's something to be said of real-world experience with veteran practitioners. As mentioned, it also depends on how they supplement their knowledge base. If a med student is rounding with a pharmacy student, I'd hope there would be interchange there that is mutually beneficial and provides the med student additional information outside of their in-class training.
 
pharmacists get a lot more training in school on this than M.D.s/DO.s but after that it depends on what a pharm or physician does to further their knowledge

Agreed. The reason why MD/DOs know more overall is because of their residency and fellowships. For all of my rotations, the med students and residents knows more about diagnosising (differentials and what tests to run). However in terms of management via pharmcotherapy disease states once the diagnosis is made, the pharmacist is king.

Most general practioners do not keep up with current practices in terms of pharmcotherapy (especially outside of their speciality). There is just no way humanely possible.
 
Without a doubt, pharmacist have more knowledge than doctors.. think about it, if doctors were so knowledgeable about it, then why do they carry pdas around with them to look up drug info..
 
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Without a doubt, pharmacist have more knowledge than doctors.. think about it, if doctors were so knowledgeable about it, then why do they carry pdas around with them to look up drug info..
Exactly :)
 
Without a doubt, pharmacist have more knowledge than doctors.. think about it, if doctors were so knowledgeable about it, then why do they carry pdas around with them to look up drug info..

I agree. We also do physical examination and diagnose as well as treat, and we also do non-pharmcological treatments such as surgery. There's too much specialized information for one type of practitioner to know everything.
 
Without a doubt, pharmacist have more knowledge than doctors.. think about it, if doctors were so knowledgeable about it, then why do they carry pdas around with them to look up drug info..

This is only true depending on the way you approach the issue. Pharmacists have more knowledge about Drugs and their interactions in the human body. Doctors are better at diagnosis. I will personally say a Doctor has more knowledge than a pharmacists overall. Doctors work under more pressure and often have to deal with emergancy procedures whereby time is a factor. A pharmacist can dispense easily. A doctor may have a matter of seconds to make a life saving decision. The doctors rule!!!
 
This is only true depending on the way you approach the issue. Pharmacists have more knowledge about Drugs and their interactions in the human body. Doctors are better at diagnosis. I will personally say a Doctor has more knowledge than a pharmacists overall. Doctors work under more pressure and often have to deal with emergancy procedures whereby time is a factor. A pharmacist can dispense easily. A doctor may have a matter of seconds to make a life saving decision. The doctors rule!!!

Topic is drug knowledge, not diagnosis. No ones trying to undermine what a doctor does obviously.
 
This is only true depending on the way you approach the issue. Pharmacists have more knowledge about Drugs and their interactions in the human body. Doctors are better at diagnosis. I will personally say a Doctor has more knowledge than a pharmacists overall. Doctors work under more pressure and often have to deal with emergancy procedures whereby time is a factor. A pharmacist can dispense easily. A doctor may have a matter of seconds to make a life saving decision. The doctors rule!!!

So a Pharmacist is only superior in his ability to dispense?

Do you even work in a pharmacy yet?

Physicians by and large do not have the time that it takes to know the Top 200/300 like we are expected to, just for starters.
 
Why are you guys even comparing, they are two different things.
Doctor focus on medicine, but actually focus more than medicine.
This is only true depending on the way you approach the issue. Pharmacists have more knowledge about Drugs and their interactions in the human body. Doctors are better at diagnosis. I will personally say a Doctor has more knowledge than a pharmacists overall. Doctors work under more pressure and often have to deal with emergancy procedures whereby time is a factor. A pharmacist can dispense easily. A doctor may have a matter of seconds to make a life saving decision. The doctors rule!!!
I agree with this statement.

You should go to the hospital and see what the Doctor does, compare to what the pharmacist does, they are two different things.
 
Why are you guys even comparing, they are two different things.
Doctor focus on medicine, but actually focus more than medicine.
I agree with this statement.

You should go to the hospital and see what the Doctor does, compare to what the pharmacist does, they are two different things.

It's an over simplistic viewpoint that is standard Jason Bourne material.

Not every Physician is expected to make life-and-death decisions in a matter of seconds. Go to a Sutter or Kaiser facility and cast your gaze upon the large sign that says "NO EMERGENCY SERVICES." That should be your first hint.

Emergency decisions are put on a very slim population of physicians in this country.

OChemist, it'd be folly to compare the two directly. We are using a point of reference, that is, pharmacological knowledge, and taking a Pharmacy graduate and a med school graduate, putting them head to head ONLY in pharmacology/drug intxns and the like, and seeing who comes out on top. It will almost assuredly be the Pharmacist's home territory, whereas the Physician's skill in, say, OBGYN specialties, will be mostly useless.

I hardly think ANYONE is going to suggest for a moment that Pharmacists "know more" than Physicians. That'd be a silly and ludicrous, and VERY generalized, erroneous statement. instead, I think we're all asserting here that, due to the nature of OUR specialization in pharmacy/pharmacology, we are superior in the realm of drug-taking and drug-giving, and how all the drugs co-mingle (or not).

There will always be exceptions to every rule, there will always be statistical outliers in every comparison/discussion - But I can't imagine an overall case where a GP/PCP has remotely comparable knowledge of pharmaceuticals that a pharmacist must possess in order to ply his trade.
 
I hope the pharm.ds I work with in the future no more about the drugs than me! I'm assuming that knowledge and part of the care team is very important! I'll also take the first Pharm. out to dinner if they save one of my patient's lives.

Random fact: My grandfather wanted to be a pharmicist back in the day (20's/30's) but ended up being a Steel Worker.
 
I hope the pharm.ds I work with in the future no more about the drugs than me! I'm assuming that knowledge and part of the care team is very important! I'll also take the first Pharm. out to dinner if they save one of my patient's lives.

Random fact: My grandfather wanted to be a pharmicist back in the day (20's/30's) but ended up being a Steel Worker.

This is going to be a super-dumb question, but before the advent of the "Drug era" (1960s+), what exactly would a Pharmacist do? Dispense Laudanum?
 
This is going to be a super-dumb question, but before the advent of the "Drug era" (1960s+), what exactly would a Pharmacist do? Dispense Laudanum?

Who knows, actually had my decades wrong. He was born in the early teens, so, 30s/40s. Still, who knows what he would've done. I don't know pharmacy.
 
This is going to be a super-dumb question, but before the advent of the "Drug era" (1960s+), what exactly would a Pharmacist do? Dispense Laudanum?

I would guess compounding and/or direct dispensing of various items to the public-at-large.
 
This is going to be a super-dumb question, but before the advent of the "Drug era" (1960s+), what exactly would a Pharmacist do? Dispense Laudanum?

Haha I'd imagine that penicillin would have been on the top 5 list.
 
Topic is drug knowledge, not diagnosis. No ones trying to undermine what a doctor does obviously.

I obviously addressed that in my post (2nd sentence). I clearly stated that a pharmacists has more knowledge about medications and interactions in the body. However, this can vary depending on the way the reader views it. Some people might choose a Doctor over a pharmacist when it comes to drug knowledge simply because a Doctor has more experience with assessing how medications have affected his patients. This means certain people will argue that a Doctor knows what medications have the most positive impact on patients. However, doctors can make mistakes when prescribing medications. This is when a pharmacist takes over. The pharmacists checks to make sure that adverse drug reactions dont take place. This obviously means pharmacists have more knowledge about drug interactions like i had earlier stated. The answer to this thread can vary depending on the way reader views it.
 
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So a Pharmacist is only superior in his ability to dispense?

Do you even work in a pharmacy yet?

Physicians by and large do not have the time that it takes to know the Top 200/300 like we are expected to, just for starters.

* Defintely a knee jerk reaction.


Read my second sentence. I had stated clearly that pharmacists are better when it comes to drug knowledge and their interactions in the body. I never undermined the job of a pharmacist. I know that pharmacists have to deal with insurance companies, Doctors, and other complex customer relation issues. In no way have i undermined the job of a pharmacist.

I also stand by the fact that the answer varies depending on who reads it. Some people might choose a Doctor over a pharmacists when it comes to drug knowledge simply because a Doctor has more experience diagnosis and with assessing how medications have affected his patients over periods of time. However, doctors can make mistakes when prescribing medications. This is when a pharmacist takes over. The pharmacists checks to make sure that adverse drug reactions dont take place. I believe that pharmacists have more knowledge about drug interactions. However, the answer to this thread can vary depending on the reader. I must mention that Doctors sometimes have no time to seek advice from a pharmacist due to emergency procedures. I have volunteered at hospitals so I definitely have experience on this issue.
 
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