Hope you like pain (I don't)

'Peutics case studies are a pretty miserable affair. It never fails that the prof is gonna look at his question and say "Oh so if I worded it like X, you would understand it?" By the way, there is no "Teacher Edition" and "Student Edition" to the English language -- you just wrote a turd question. It is also inevitable that you are asked to make decisions based on next to no evidence whatsoever or evidence that blatantly just doesn't exist or make sense.

You find out a patient you gave naproxen to is getting it from a different doctor at a different pharmacy. What do you do? Apparently run a motherfucking KASPER report. Who cares that he isn't even taking a controlled substance because you are the NARC-iest pharmacist ever and never recommend opiates? Who cares that naproxen doesn't even show up on a KASPER report? Not me, now get out there and bust some tylenol-whores! I bet if we went to his house and ripped up his floorboards you'd just see an endless sea of Naproxen!


What I look like during every case study
And I'm sorry, but I really don't appreciate Dr. Bald Howard Dean's answer to some of the questions.

What Howard Dean looks like, for reference
Anyway, I don't appreciate his answer to a lot of the questions. Such as "Why don't we treat the uncontrolled (and very severe) hypertension of a patient with a family history of MI?" Oh, well you see we're in a pain clinic, not a hypertension clinic you dolt! Hmmm...I wonder why we care about the illness of her spouse then? Are we in a "My spouse is sick clinic"? And we care about her headaches, but not her ballskicking hypertension that could, guess what, cause her headaches.

I also don't appreciate how he completely disparaged the thought that glucose and chondrointin could help with osteoarthritis when it's one of the few herbal agents thats actually been studied and it has an evidence level of A/B depending on what we're talking about. As much as I dissed on Granny P for her women's health module (or as I affectionately referred to it: Bitch's problems), she's the HBIC and granny-in-charge when it comes to complementary and alternative medicine -- mostly because she teaches two classes on it.

Make no mistake about it: your job on the exam isn't to answer the question as to what is right, what pain doctors do, or what even happens in the real world. Your job on this exam is quite simply to be a NARC and a mindreader. A NARC because our prof clearly thinks that controlled substances aren't ever long term therapy (hint: they are) and a mindreader because you're going to be asked to delve into his gray matter with bait and a reel and try to fish out what Dr. Dean thinks about treating pain. Just as this exam will drop a hefty chocolate log down our proverbial chimneys, Daddy will be delivering a stack of literature showing the benefit of glucosamine and chondroitin to someone's office.

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