pharm1234 said:
Pistons,
Are you a doctor?
You think pharmacists will make less money 10-15 years from now? Why, because of technology?
This wasn't directed at me, but I was a pharmacist for 6 years before going to medical school (where I am now), so you might be interested in my perspective on the two fields.
Just so you know, the reason I'm leaving pharmacy has nothing to do with how viable the field will be 20 years from now. But the field will have to change dramatically in the next 10 years, or it will go the way of the dinosaurs. Right now, the Pharmacy Practice Acts of the various states are artificially propping up the retail side of pharmacist demand. The technology is available
right now to eliminate 90% of retail pharmacist jobs. However, health care is very slow to adopt technology, and rightfully so due to the complexity of the decisions and tasks involved in delivering care, and the fact that the acceptable level of error in any non-human component of the health care system is essentially zero. Also, because physician practice is still largely a cottage industry or at the most, a small business endeavor, and information technology tends to be extremely expensive to implement, most physician offices cannot currently function in a paperless environment. But 10 years from now, I think that will be very different. And once that barrier has been eliminated, the large retail chains and PBMs will lobby hard to get the state practice acts changed so that they can eliminate the huge budget drain that pharmacist salaries represent for them.
The profession is in major denial about this, and consequently is not moving fast enough to stake out other areas of practice for the day when their legislative life-support is withdrawn. There is also fierce opposition from other constituencies within health care to any expansion in role. But there's also a lot of opposition within the profession, some of it due to fear of liability, and some of it due to the very same reasons people choose pharmacy in the first place, i.e. they don't
want the responsibility. Most people haven't firgured out that the choice is not between the status quo and more responsibility, it's between more responsibility or no job at all.
As for me, I had positioned myself to avoid obsolescence, even if I never got into med school. But that's because I didn't choose pharmacy to avoid medicine, I chose it because I didn't think medicine was an option for me, and it was the best alternative available. There will always be a place, in every profession, for the aggressive go-getter who's not afraid of more work and more responsibility. However, the reward for that kind of thing is greater in medicine, both monetarily and in terms of helping your patients.
I'd like to see pharmacy as a whole morph into something with long-term viability. But at some point in the next 10-15 years, the competition for jobs is going to get very fierce, and if you choose pharmacy, just make sure you make the sacrifices you'll need to make in order to land the kind of clinical job that can't be done by a robot.
Or, you could go into medicine, where your battle will be to keep your income, rather than your job, and to keep your freedom to do what you think is best for your patient, rather than trying to establish that you even have the ability and training to make that decision.
