MTM Monday; I feel like I soaked my head in Lidocaine

So today was the dreaded “MTM Monday,” and I have no idea how I got enlisted to do this. A fellow pharmtard remarked that doing all these MTMs means I’ll be more prepared later on – to which I replied that “looking more confused for greater amounts of time doesn’t constitute being prepared.”

One of the tech’s sons went to the doctor with “strep throat.” Doctor just looked at the kid, said “Yep, its strep” and writes a script for a Z-pak lickety-split despite a negative rapid strep test. Days later the culture came back negative as well. Don’t you love patient care that revolves around writing for drugs so that the patient will shut up and leave?

Here’s a fun thing to do: MTM on patients who get only half of their medicine at your pharmacy. You have no clue how the drugs from the other pharmacy are dosed, and you certainly don’t have the jurisdiction to try to fix any problems with that half of their medication profile. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know if this dude is still taking half this crap – I just know that sometime in the last six months, he probably swallowed a plavix tablet. That’s it. Furthermore: why the hell don’t pharmacists get a diagnosis with each and every prescription? Not only can we then determine if this drug is appropriate, but then we can find drug-disease interactions. I mean sure, 90% of the time (assuming the MD didn’t get his degree from Clown College, USA) you can tell whats going on from the drug being used. But what about drugs like prochlorperazine? Indications include: Nausea/Vomiting, Schizophrenia, or Anxiety. That’s a fairly broad range, folks – at least it sucks at treating all three.

Don’t get me wrong, I think MTM is a good program – but in order to be worth anything it’s going to need truck balls. a racin’ stripe! an overhaul. Part of said overhaul is to mandate that a patient get all chronic care meds at a single pharmacy if possible. Another part is to give the pharmacist some incentive to do the damn thing. That could be giving us a cut of the money we save their sorry asses, or reimburse us fairly for our labor. As it is right now, the pharmacy loses money (spent on labor) on every MTM that they do, and the end result is to decrease pharmacy revenue. MTM programs are basically saying “Hey pillhead, how about I short you $50 on labor costs so that you can work to decrease your revenue so that *I* can cut costs.” And my preceptor replied “how about I get my pharmtarded work-for-free intern to do it so I can decrease my reven…well shit”

Also, at least one pharmtard called me arrogant. While this may be the case, one reason was that I’m writing this blog about what *I* think is funny or important. Well no shit Sherlock, that’s what a personal blog does. I didn’t force you to read it.

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