WVUPharm2007,
You are right dude! You know more about the drug mechanisms than anybody else and you cannot diagnose or treat ANYBODY!!!!! You are not an IDLP (Independent Doctorate Level Prescriber)---MD,DO,OD,DDS,DPM. rather you are a patient advocate and a check and balance for health care professionals...I will give you a call when I have a question about a drug! My best friend is an pharmacist and I will pick his brain in the future.
Huh. I didn't even know "IDLP" was a term. According to acronymfinder.com, it stands for Integrated Data Link Pod. Honestly, that sounds way cooler than being a pharmacist, ophthalmologist, optomotrist, and even Dave & Buster's bartender. I betcha that'd pick up the chicks. Hey, baby, I'm an integrated data link pod. Want to go have a nightcap over at my loft by the river?
But, yeah, I don't do physical diagnosis and, frankly, I don't want to. It just doesn't interest me. But I only went to school for 6 years, get paid an obnoxious amount for it, only work 40 hours a week, and I don't have a pager on me. I may as well not even know what being on-call means because I will never encounter it. Personally, I wish I thought it meant "out doing price comparisons on the latest models of bidets." Then when I call the operator at my hospital and she tells me I can't talk to the original prescriber, but his colleague is on call and available, I will think she said, "Dr. A isn't on tonight, but Dr. B is out doing price comparisons on the latest models of bidets, let me connect you to his cell phone." That minute change alone will drastically improve my overall quality of life.
I'd rather have that than the super-magical ability to write things down on a piece of paper that can be exchanged for goods/service. What the hell do I need with prescriptive authority, anyway? The only reason I'd want it is so that I don't have to go to a physician for something stupid. If I need a drug, I can just yank some of the shelf behind me. (It helps if you imagine me saying that in a labcoat standing in front of a fully stocked pharmacy with my hand extended outward like Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune after she flips one of the letters.)
I never made the association that prescribing oral steroids = the right to do LASIK........geeeez can you please get off my back?? LMAO
And I'm just a smart ass. I enjoy my work.
Though I must ask...and this is just curiosity...is your class literally pharmacology (i.e. the science behind drug-receptor-cellular response mechanisms) or is it pharmacotherapeutics (what drugs do to the body with a focus on clinical outcomes) that is erroneously labeled as "pharmacology."
Pharmacology is the most horrendous, god awful thing ever and I can't fathom an optometrist actually having to know anything about it. And if they make you study that crap, I find it humorous...