Thursday, December 29, 2005
New Patients
Every store I have ever worked in has got its interesting/difficult/crazy patients. The pharmacy I worked for during school had an obsessive-compulsive patient. This person drove the pharmacist crazy. They had called the Palmetto Poison Center so many times that the center would no longer take their calls. They would buy enemas and bowel stimulants one day and the next day they would buy anti-diarreal medications. They also loved to discuss in detail the color and consistency of their bowel movement. They was very suspicious of new employees until they could figure out whether the employees were pharmacy students or mere staff member. They loved pharmacy students since the pharmacist would not talk to them. I spent over an hour the first time they got me on the phone. They wanted to know whether or not they should go to see a doctor. I thought based on their symptoms that they had Crohns diseases or at least irritable bowel syndrome. No, it was all self-induced. When I worked in Charleston, we had a patient that bought eight enemas 2-3 times per week. In Newberry, we had a patient that hoarded items. They would buy 6 Monistats, 5 large bottles of Tylenol, and other miscellaneous items in bulk weekly. I am not sure if they had a compulsion to collect or if they were reselling the stuff. I was told that they had a trust fund and someone to dole out their money.
I have been open for 2 months and I think I found my first interesting patient. They has several auto-immune issues. I do not claim to understand auto-immune disease. These diseases present with odd symptoms and are often rule-out diagnosis. Medicine is more of an art than a science. We are very limited in our ability to run true scientific experiment. You can't give one group of patients a potentially life saving treatment and withhold all treatment from the control group. J believes that there is often a psychiatric cause for some auto-immune diseases. She has already met our new patient and has suggested (to me only) that they see a psychiatrist.
I have been open for 2 months and I think I found my first interesting patient. They has several auto-immune issues. I do not claim to understand auto-immune disease. These diseases present with odd symptoms and are often rule-out diagnosis. Medicine is more of an art than a science. We are very limited in our ability to run true scientific experiment. You can't give one group of patients a potentially life saving treatment and withhold all treatment from the control group. J believes that there is often a psychiatric cause for some auto-immune diseases. She has already met our new patient and has suggested (to me only) that they see a psychiatrist.
# posted by Dawn @ 3:20 PM 
