Personalized Medicine and The Pharmacist

Misconception of Personalized Medicine

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Personalized medicine is definitely a good way for pharmacy to be heading right now. Pharmacists are under-utilized in a pharmacy with the current “dispensing model.”  With the advancements in personalized medicine, it seems that a change is definitely coming this way along, especially with the establishment of the Blueprint for Pharmacy.

Recently, CTV.ca posted a link on a story about personalized medicine and how the government is investing $6.5 million in certain groups doing research on the area. The information on the article was good, but as it is just an article on the web, there was no external links to read for more information. The comments on the article itself were very biased. There were many comments that talked about how there are not enough physicians in certain areas and how there are too many specialists rather than general practitioners. But the most striking thing to me was that there was absolutely no mention of pharmacists being involved.

It seems that the public believes that personalized medicine would be an area of expertise for certain physicians, rather than a way of treating patients, in a general sense. The article made no mention of pharmacists and their roles in personalized medicine. I agree that physicians would have a role in personalized medicine, but there is so much a pharmacist can do as well considering the personalized medicine is aimed towards tailoring drug therapy to a unique individual. Drug therapy is a pharmacist’s field of expertise.

The image of a pharmacist has not changed in years and this is possibly a reason why the public only views personalized medicine as an area for physicians. Pharmacist’ need to be more pro-active in marketing our profession and showing the public and the government that we are more than just people who dispense drugs. There should be more emphasis on how our profession is changing and what the public can expect from pharmacists in terms of health care services.

 

 

By: Karmen Shum, Willy Lu, Kevin Seok, Joy Qiao, Nazneen Dhaliwal, and Shane Tamana

Written by kshum

February 1st, 2012 at 3:42 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

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