Pharmacists are medication experts. Behind the counter, they check for drug interactions, make sure the prescribed drug is appropriate for your disease state, and ensure it is safe for you to take.
In this blog post, we will discuss what questions a pharmacist can answer regarding medication.
Questions Regarding Medication Interactions and Side Effects
Grapefruit goes through the liver. It’s part of something called the cytochrome P450 system. What that means is that it can disrupt the metabolism of medications; it can alter the absorption of that drug, meaning that more of the drug will remain in your bloodstream and you’ll be more likely to experience the toxicity associated with that drug and experience side effects.
Ask A Pharmacist About Your Medication
Most over-the-counter medications are safe and effective when used as directed. However, Tylenol can be toxic, specifically to your liver. So there is a maximum amount of Tylenol that you should consume within 24 hours. The max is four grams.
So if you’ve got cough and cold preparation over here and then you have some regular Tylenol over here, you have to add the two together and make sure it doesn’t go over that three gram in a day limit.
Regarding Medication Expiration Dates
Expiration dates are what we know to be safe and effective. Your expiration date is a guidepost. Ultimately, there are some drugs that, if you don’t use them by their expiration date, can become toxic.
An example of this is doxycycline. Doxycycline starts to break down, and the chemical that’s left can be very toxic to you if you ingest it. Most medications, however, do not become toxic. They reduce their efficacy.
You may have to take more, which means you possibly could take an inaccurate dose or have an overdose because you’re taking more medication than is needed because it’s not as effective. So the key here is, whenever possible, please try not to take any expired medications.
Regarding Extended Release Medication Formulations
Oral medications are unique in the fact that they may undergo something called first-pass metabolism. Medications are composed of chemicals transformed through the actions of our body. One way that happens is through first-pass metabolism, where the medication is metabolized in the liver.
The chemical structure left after that process is called a substrate. Sometimes, to make the medication last longer, we use a precursor to that substrate, which allows the main medication, or the active ingredient, to be metabolized after first-pass metabolism and become the active medication.
Regarding Vaccines and Booster
There are a couple of reasons why vaccine boosters may occur. The first is whether or not the person has been exposed to the vaccination in the past. For example, most childhood vaccinations require lots of booster doses because it’s new to their immune system and we want them to develop an appropriate response.
Same thing with the influenza vaccine or the COVID-19 vaccine. Once you receive it, we’re basically priming the pump, and then we give you a booster in order for your immune system to be able to recognize it if it sees it in the environment.
Vaccinations are the single most effective medical intervention that we’ve had within our history; we know that thousands and thousands of children would not survive if it wasn’t for childhood vaccines.
Regarding Medication Purchasing Restrictions
Some medications, even though they’re technically considered over-the-counter, would be behind-the-counter in the pharmacy.
This is because we have to document how much pseudoephedrine you’re purchasing daily. Before we had this restriction, pseudoephedrine was being used to fuel methamphetamine processing in different areas of the country.
We need to keep track of who’s purchasing it to hopefully stem the production of illegal drugs. So the reason why we have this requirement is so that we don’t have more meth labs.
Regarding Medication and Alcohol Interactions
First of all, how much alcohol are you drinking? ‘Cause alcohol toxicity can be pretty bad. When we’re just looking at alcohol and antibiotics together, the key here is that there are some agents that you can get really sick from taking with alcohol.
So one of those is something called metronidazole, which is an anti-infective, and it will make you violently ill if you take it with alcohol. Another medication, say penicillin, if you take that with alcohol, it may make the penicillin less effective because it’s altering your gut. Rule of thumb: just don’t drink until you feel better.
Regarding Medication Uses of Melatonin and Ozempic
The original use of Ozempic was to treat diabetes, and then they realized, in addition to lowering blood sugar, it also caused people to lose weight. It improved their cardiac health, reduced their cholesterol, and improved their kidney function.
If they had kidney problems associated with their diabetes, it’s also being looked at potentially for Alzheimer’s disease, and it was recently FDA-approved to treat sleep apnea.
This drug, for all intensive purposes, seems like a miracle cure. However, there are some downsides. It can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and loss of appetite. Loss of appetite sounds like it could be a good thing, especially if you’re trying to lose weight. However, the weight comes from everywhere, and not only do you lose fat, but you lose muscle as well.
Regarding Medication Development and Drug Shortages
It costs millions of dollars to develop a new drug. It can come from natural sources or from synthetic compounds or chemicals.
Typically, it involves clinical trials of compounds known to cause therapeutic effects in other disease states, and then we try them to see if they work in others. A lot of the medications derive from venoms or toxins that are produced by animals or biological sources like viruses and bacteria. One of our popular diabetes medications comes from the saliva of a Gila monster.
Artificial intelligence can help identify new potential drug targets, can also help us repurpose existing drug targets, determine what clinical trial participants are appropriate for a given study, and last, but not least, it can help us synthesize mass amounts of data, and this is gonna help us further identify new drugs that we can use to cure old diseases
