Open now: Practice Skills Refresher Course (now with labs!)

Will you be taking your Georgia licensing exam later this year? (Know someone who will? Maybe a graduate? Maybe a pharmacist moving to Georgia?) Then brush up on the practical skills you need to have.

GPhA’s crazy-popular program — the “Practical Skills Refresher Course” — is coming in 2020 on four days in four locations. It’s a concentrated, four-hour refresher on terminology, measurements, and the procedures you’ll put into practice. You can just imagine how useful this will be, especially if you’re taking the wet labs exam.

NEW: For 2020 we’ve added “Practical Skills for the Lab” — lab time with an instructor to watch you and provide feedback, in a simulated testing environment.

If you’re a student pharmacist or a transfer to Georgia, you want this course. You NEED this course. Click here for more info and to register NOW!

Did you know?

In the U.S., the job with the highest salary requiring the least amount of experience is … pharmacist. (Before your hackles get raised, keep in mind that this simply means they get paid the most right out of school. “No experience” doesn’t mean “easy.”)

While pharmacists often rank high on top-paying jobs lists, the high salary comes only after years of education, which includes training in a learning environment. […] students must earn a four-year doctoral or professional degree and complete a series of clinical rotations within their program before being able to practice.

How low can they go?

Ah, the Sackler family — the folks of Oxycontin fame. Even as they face billions of dollars’ of lawsuits here over how they pushed opioids and helped create the current crisis, they are trying the same tactics … in China.

Check out “Fake doctors, misleading claims drive OxyContin China sales“.

[R]epresentatives from the Sacklers’ Chinese affiliate, Mundipharma, tell doctors that time-release painkillers like OxyContin are less addictive than other opioids—the same pitch Purdue admitted was false in U.S. court more than a decade ago.

Mundipharma has pushed ever larger doses of opioids, even as it became clear that higher doses present higher risks, and represented the drug as safe for chronic pain, according the interviews and documents.

Statins and prostate cancer

It seems that good ol’ statins, while helping reduce cholesterol, can also reduce men’s risk of contracting the more aggressive type of prostate cancer.

[T]here were no differences in the overall rates of prostate cancer among men who were prescribed statins. However, men who had taken statin medicines had a 24% reduced risk of developing a more lethal type of prostate cancer when compared to men who were not.

I’ve got half a mind….

Yes, yes, this is a serious medical story. But come on, if your mind didn’t go to the humor possibilities, you need to get out more.

Some children with serious brain issues might have literally half their brains removed — and still grow up to function in society*. Only now are scientists beginning to understand how that’s possible.

It was almost as if parts of the brain that may have normally been specialized, say, as trumpet players, had talked to the rest of the band and taken additional responsibilities to play percussion instruments as well. “Their brain networks seem to be multitasking.”

Same old song

Medbelle’s 2019 Medicine Price Index looked at 13 common medications and their prices across 50 countries. It found that…

• Americans pay the highest prices in the world overall for drugs (branded and generic): 307% above the worldwide average. (Next highest is Germany, but Germans only pay about 126% above average.)
• Americans pay the highest prices for branded drugs: 422% above the worldwide average
• We’re not so bad when it comes to generics, paying only 92% above average.
• Except for the immunosuppressive drug Prograf (tacrolimus), we pay the most for every single drug studied.
• In the case of Zestril (lisinopril) we pay 2,683% more — that’s almost 27 times more than the worldwide average. In contrast, Canadians pay only 49% more than average.

All quiet on the nomination front

Although it’s being overshadowed by other events on Capitol Hill, FDA commissioner nominee Stephen Hahn’s confirmation hearing is in progress, and it seems to be fairly non-controversial. Hahn “stuck to the script” for the most part, pledged this and that, and in general seems to be qualified for the job.

The only issue that arose was Hahn’s refusal to commit to banning flavored e-cigarettes — a policy with support on both sides of the aisle.

Hahn demurred when asked if he would push Trump to issue regulations banning e-cig flavors, but told Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, that he was “alarmed” by data showing a widespread uptick of teenage vaping and supported “bold action.”

Nicotine: As you were

The FDA has dropped its plan to require cigarette makers to lower the amount of nicotine in their cigarettes.

Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council*, earlier this month called the FDA’s regulation of tobacco “a huge waste of time” and said the agency should focus on pharmaceuticals.

On the other hand…

Former FDA commissioner Robert Califf said on Twitter that the change marked “a sad day for future grandchildren. They will have fewer grandparents because of this.”

Cool* medical news

For the first time, humans have been placed in suspended animation. Suffering from major trauma (including cardiac arrest) and not expected to survive surgery, they were cooled to about half their normal body temperature, and — hold onto your hats — had all their blood replaced with ice-cold saline. That gives surgeons extra time to operate.

Sounds pretty impressive, right? The initial was on 10 people, but … the doctors aren’t saying how many of them survived.

Animal studies showed that pigs with acute trauma could be cooled for 3 hours, stitched up and resuscitated. “We felt it was time to take it to our patients,” says [researcher Samuel Tisherman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine]. “Now we are doing it and we are learning a lot as we move forward with the trial. Once we can prove it works here, we can expand the utility of this technique to help patients survive that otherwise would not.”