So, of all the professions that are portrayed inaccurately in media, “pharmacy tech” is a… fun one.
Because we mostly don’t even EXIST. When a fictional character gets a medicine, mostly you’ll just see the doctor prescribe it, and then the character just suddenly… has it.
You rarely even see a pharmacy at all, let alone get any clear idea of just what pharmacists and pharmacy technicians actually do, let alone the difference between their roles.
And, whether these fictional portrayals are a cause or a symptom or both– this is a real problem. Because people who see pharmacies as a forgettable and unimportant step in the process are not gonna be prepared for the issues that come up there.
People will say “I found a doctor who’s covered by my insurance” or “I found a doctor who will treat me without insurance” or sometimes even just “I found a doctor who’s willing to treat me for this!”– and while that alone is sometimes a huge battle to win, it’s not over.
People forget that “a doctor treating you” usually means, even in the best case, “a doctor asks you some questions and then writes a prescription, which is just a paper saying you are allowed to use a certain medicine.”
And getting that medicine is an entirely different process, which the doctor very likely knows nothing about.
Including:
- what the med costs
- which insurance would cover it and how much
- what options the patient may have for assistance with this cost
- which pharmacies are licensed to provide the medicine
- whether there is a current national shortage of it
- whether it is actually even manufactured anymore anywhere
I have dealt with prescriptions written by doctors who clearly know few if any of these things.
And not everyone in the pharmacy will know, either! Pharmacy techs these days are trained on the job like retail employees, by their already-busy coworkers… and if you’ve got a tough question about availability or insurance coverage, there may only be one person in the pharmacy who’s ever gotten the chance to learn how to help you with it. Or not even one, sometimes.
(In my experience the pharmacy technicians– the senior ones who’ve been there the longest, not the newbies they’re training– are usually the ones most likely to know how to resolve a problem with insurance coverage.)
(And “been there the longest” really means specifically there, at that exact pharmacy, because things are done very differently in different systems. I’ve entered new jobs with years and years of experience and found myself starting over from pretty much nothing.)
(Pharmacists have the most authority, especially regarding questions about medication itself and how it’s used– but they do not tend to have the most knowledge about how to get it paid for.)
(Technicians may also be the ones with the most knowledge about which meds are in stock and how to order more of them– or that may be a whole different job done by inventory specialists, who the pharmacists and techs may or may not be able to get a hold of to ask. Depends on the pharmacy.)
So this got me thinking about the representation of pharmacies and pharmacists in fiction, and I realized something: It’s actually pretty common to see depictions of pharmacists as they used to be, many years ago. By that I mean, in the pharmacies of yore, the personell didn’t just dispense the pre-made and packaged medicine to you, they mixed it right there in the pharmacy, based on what was written on the prescription (and even earlier than that, the doctor and the pharmacist was basically the same person, diagnosing and making the medicine). There are still some vestiges of this in some pharmacies (such as mixing powdered antibiotics with water to get a drinkable fluid), but I feel like the role of most pharmacists has gone from making the medicine to just dispensing it (and using their knowledge to make sure that the dosage is correct, that insurance covers it, or finding the medicine somewhere else if the pharmacy doesn’t have it, etc.), unless they work at a hospital or in the pharmaceutical industry.
What I’m saying is, someone in a fantasy setting mixing “healing potions” and the like could be considered a pharmacist. And there are plenty of superheroes (most famously Captain America, though my personal favorite is the more obscure DC Comics character Hourman) who have gotten their powers from some miracle drug, which I again think falls under the pharmaceutical science.
Yeah, the pharmacy business has changed a lot over the years for sure!
I’ve never worked in a compounding pharmacy – the kind that specializes in custom-making medicines on the premises for specific patient needs– most pharmacies will do only a little bit of compounding, like those powdered antibiotic mixes, and, yeah, the process is very very different from its earliest versions, which… yeah, were basically healers who mixed potions.
One little linguistic detail I love is how, in British English, the word “chemist” is used for what “pharmacist” means in the US.