Here lies the residue of "The Animating Apothecary," a source of obscure ephemera and thoughts. Instagram? see - https://www.instagram.com/animating_apothecary/ also check out asifa.org and asifa.net - content (c) 2006-2026 Jim Middleton (一個古怪的老頭，總是揮舞著雙手，哈哈大笑。or -手を振りながらよく笑うクレイジーな老人 or 손을 흔들며 웃는 미친 노인 )
Trials and tribulations - in pharmacy, in the 1990s, in using a DOS animation software, and using a mouse to draw - and the 400x300 resolution was a real challenge for file size uploads!
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...but there you go!... Back when independent pharmacies had a fighting chance! |
This was considered AN EVENT because the portable reel-to-reel 1-inch tape could record live and give instant gratification for WATCHING IMMEDIATELY, but it HAD SOUND. Super 8mm film just couldn't give me that, so it was a novelty, and the A/V department at Ferris State College allowed a couple of students to check out this 30 pound portable recorder and camera for a weekend. This footage was for a "Pharmacy Fun Night" (once a year, we were permitted to have fun) and we ran all over the building searching for a location before trying out a "man on the street" moment. 45 seconds remains of this epic! It took another nine years before I could drop $1000 on a camera/recorder (in ONE unit! Imagine!) that would record in 1/2 inch VHS.
The Story of Pharmacology in Under 1000 Words
In the beginning, anything could be a drug. Whether it was ground from a plant or found in an animal, it was ingested, applied, or injected by our ancestors. Eventually, scribes wrote things down to help remember what was beneficial (for use in the community) or poisonous (for use against an enemy). Priests became physicians, rituals became office calls, and hieroglyphics became prescriptions. Physicians lost the time to make their own medicines, so they turned the work over to apprentices who became pharmacists. Throughout the whole evolutionary process, everything worked just fine and everyone became healthier. Well, not exactly.
In the United States before 1906, if you wanted a drug and you had the money, you could just go out and buy it. Prescriptions were only a recommended option, and in some states, licensing any health professional was actively discouraged.
Patent medicines were loaded with morphine, cocaine, cannabis, or mercury compounds (so much so that archaeologists tracing the path of Lewis and Clark could identify fort locations by the levels of mercury still remaining in the explorers’ abandoned latrines).
Morphine was so widely used during the American Civil War that, after 1865, over 100,000 soldiers had some form of habituation or addiction to the narcotic.
The demand for drugs, licit and illicit, was sufficient enough for Sears to issue a separate drug catalogue at the start of the 20th century, essentially creating the first mail-order pharmacy.
In response to scandals of patient deaths and addictions, President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Considered a radical measure in its time, the act initially could only assure that ingredients and their amounts were listed on a patent medicine label (you could still get “arsenic tabules” for your complexion, but at least you knew it contained arsenic; this was considered a major breakthrough for consumer safety).
Plants served as the primary source for drugs. The term pharmacognosy, meaning “knowledge of drugs,” essentially meant the knowledge of plants.
Eventually, specific chemicals were discovered, isolated, or synthesized, and the sources for drugs began to shift from plants to the chemist’s bench. The idea was to create an inexhaustible supply of drugs. Being able to minimize unexpected responses came from carefully controlling the dose.
Even with the progression of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Agency into the present-day FDA (its focus becoming foods and drugs), it still had little power to protect consumers. The fine against a Dr. James Peebles for selling “bitter almonds” (cyanide) as part of a treatment for epilepsy was a mere $5 in 1913.
It took further health disasters to prompt the creation of safety regulations. In 1937, deaths from a toxic solvent in the antibiotic sulfanilamide prompted a law requiring new drugs actually be shown safe before marketing (the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938). Serious birth defects in 1962 linked to thalidomide inspired the Kefauver-Harris amendments to assure that drugs were tested for safety and effectiveness before marketing.
Package inserts for patient information eventually appeared in 1970.
In between these laws came the Durham-Humphrey act, dividing drugs into the categories of non-prescription, prescription, and controlled substances:
Controlled substances were those drugs with the potential for addiction or abuse.
Non-prescription drugs became commonly known as over the counter drugs or OTCs.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) appeared in the early 1970s; and, with it, the establishment of controlled substance schedules or categories, ranked by the drug’s potential for abuse. These categories became schedules I (one) through V (five), and are still in use today:
Pharmacology Today in Under 300 Words
Modern pharmacology is a combined study of anything that can interact with living systems. It builds upon knowledge of physiology, chemistry, botany, biochemistry, and mathematical theorems. Even the study of pharmacognosy, after decades of being brushed aside as irrelevant, has reappeared with the increased interest in “herbal” or “natural” therapy...in some ways, we have not journeyed far from the explorers who traveled with Lewis and Clark in 1803.
Looking Sidewarys: Supportive Personnel and the Retail Experience
(1979 Essay by yr hmbl typst)
"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." – Lewis Carroll
Tucked aside in some tawdry antechamber, hidden between notes brittled by two years of well-deserved dust, there lies an essay I carefully clipped from a library journal in my pre-Xerox years (meaning, before I had a job or money to use their machine) that, to this day, I feel remains the Final Word and Definitive Statement regarding Supportive Personnel (read "technicians"). It was well argued, and, in the course of its dialectics, came to a consummation devoutly to he wished (ouch). So moving was the conclusion that I instantly called the piece my own, and I remain certain that if I had it now, or could at least remember what the moving conclusion was in the first place, this small distortion would proceed to slide more smoothly. However, since my days of digging through tawdry antechambers are well past (it always being my philosophy to let sleeping dust lie), I press go ahead, au naturel.
Throughout my sojourn at college, there was a lot of talk about these pharmacy technicians. Internships were scarce in that protoplasmic era, and these doggone technicians weren't making it any easier, we collectively surmised. And the obscure future – when our hands would be stamped with the indelible RPh – what then? Technicians would he there too, peeling into the job market, hundreds of them for every pharmacist. How could we ever rent the ‘Vet of our dreams while on unemployment? Our overly-educated prospects seemed dimmer than Tokyo's odds in a Godzilla movie. Lordy! Technicians would be everywhere!
Many a student examined such a fate, a life without Brooks Brothers suits, matching pants, and clean shirts, and would shake their heads, and with typewriters tucked under arms go on to dental school.
Namely, the wave of the future – Clinical pharmacy! (cue the balloons) And, as Kermit would say, "Yaaaaaay!"
So, let us examine, herald, and fully support this all-important Supportive Personnel. Until recently, there was no set program for a pharmacy technician, no special training beyond hands-on experience. Often, a technician began as a clerk who just happened to be assigned to the prescription counter. What was lacking in all this was standardization. In a world of semantics, one man's technician would be another man's clerk.
Without some academic continuity, the position of technician would have little meaning besides the title. Ohio offered the first collegiate-level program, and in Michigan community colleges, similar courses are being offered. This State has also taken to the idea of certification for technicians, and the MPA has opened its doors to membership, as well as providing educational seminars for technicians.
Is certification of supportive personnel the answer? If it is, I must have forgotten the question. I think it had something to do with a tawdry antechamber, but I've been wrong before...
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| Well, maybe a fantasy, after all. Pharmacists are prone to fantasy, you know, like lunchtime. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/UncleStan |
