GROUNDHOG DAY… AGAIN Fintan Moore reflects on 20 years of writing for Irish Pharmacist By Fintan Moore
They say that time flies by when you’re having fun, but it passes pretty quickly when you’re working too. The days might occasionally drag a bit but you can blink and realise that a few years have gone by in what seems like no time at all. At any rate, that was how it felt to me when the Editor let me know that I’ve now been writing a monthly column for 20 years. As the saying goes ‘the past is a different country’, and 1999 certainly had its differences to today — pharmacies were still regulated in terms of where they could open, the only School of Pharmacy was in TCD, and the morning after ‘pill’ was an off-label dose of two Ovran 30 tablets. Things have certainly changed in some ways. On the other hand, I took a look back at what was exercising my mind two decades ago and some things haven’t changed much at all. 1999: Celtic tiger
obnoxious, cheer yourself up by looking at their patient history – they will almost invariably have a record of insomnia, stomach ulcers or heart disease.
There’s no town like a boomtown. Everybody making loadsamoney and buying bigger houses and faster cars. Sitting in the sun outside a coffee shop drinking espresso, or else in the shade in a wine bar sampling a crisp Chardonnay or an earthy Merlot. Every window has a ‘help wanted’ sign, but every week you walk by more beggars and step over more sleeping bags. The average Joe is mortgaged to the neck to buy a shoebox, and spends three hours a day commuting, watching other lemmings scream abuse at each other for stealing five yards of road in a traffic jam. The newspapers keep talking-up the party and there’s no sign of the good times stopping rolling.
Do not fill Valium 10mg containers with Warfarin 3mg tablets and leave them in your drug safe for syringeraiders. The ethical pharmacist wouldn’t even think of this. Computers do NOT respond to physical or verbal abuse. Accept the fact that ‘upgrades’ aren’t and ‘help-desks’ don’t. Computer terms like ‘help-desk’ and ‘telephone support’ belong to the same lexicon as ‘military intelligence’ and ‘political integrity’. 2000: ‘Natural’ Remedies It’s hard to keep a straight face at times when people ask if you can order some totally obscure product that even health-food shops can’t source. Did you know that you can buy ‘Beaver Fat Capsules’ to protect you from the effects of ageing? Apparently, because of the high levels of bark in the beaver’s diet, its body fat is particularly rich in beneficial tannins and antioxidants. Actually, I just made that up, but there are people who would swallow it, and would pay handsomely to do so. I think over-regulation of the ‘natural medicine’ market would be wrong, but the leeway that has existed for charlatans to exploit the unwary has been crying out for attention. Especially if you put the words ‘weight loss’ on anything, you will find people to use it, as long as they don’t have to walk to the shop to buy it, and can eat a bar of chocolate to survive the drive home.
Yeah, London in 1999 was a lot like Dublin today. 1999: Packaging Design Do the people who design the packaging for drugs ever consider the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the dispensing stage in a drug’s journey from factory to patient? One company’s antibiotic liquid is protected by a paper seal beneath the cap. The seal is gummed so tightly that after you tear it, you have to scrape the remnants off the mouth of the bottle with a blade (a fingernail would work, but hygiene forbids that). 1999: Thoughts Inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Sunscreen’ Remember the compliments you receive. Forget the insults, but if someone is unreasonably and aggressively 16
