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Arguing that water is indeed not wet

·2284 words·11 mins

Before I get into my usual rant about the stupidity of the common-folk, if you wish to get email notifications about new entries here (rather than refreshing my website 1000 times a day), just enter your email in the area on the right hand side of your screen marked “Subscribe to this blog”.  No, I’m not going to sell/use/molest your email address.  If you are paranoid about that, then get the sand castle out of your vagina and waste lots of time refreshing my site for content that others will get emails about.

Now, onto the stupidity.

Have you ever noticed that some people just like to argue?  Not the usual ‘I think I have a valid point, so I shall argue with you’, but ‘I am so retarded and cannot understand the big words that you speak out of your mouth’.  What’s sad is that no matter how clear you make it, they just dont get it.  Usually this involves refills in one way or another.

  • Person comes in and wants a refill for an Rx for some TAC cream that was filled over a year ago.  The Rx had 5 refills on it, but was over a year old so the Rx is expired.  Even though I am really clear (how much clearer can you get than “the Rx is over a year old, it has expired, the refills are no longer good”) the idiot just sits there and argues that he has 5 refills on the Rx and he wants it filled.  Eventually I get frustrated and make some really vague analogy to drinking expired milk (which he probably does) and eventually the neurons fire and he ‘gets it’.  My soul died a bit to realize that this idiot is reproducing.
  • No refills on C-2 narcotics always seems to completely throw everyone for a loop.  Every month the same idiot wants you to fax the doctors for a refill for Methadone and every month you tell the idiot that a C-2 narcotic cannot have any refills and you need a new Rx.  Once in a while you’ll get a new doctor on the phone (or mostly a seasoned PA/NP) arguing with you that since the little Rx blank has a refill bar that C-2’s can now be refilled.  They are completely oblivious that their Rx pads are for /all/ controlled substances, not just C-2 narcotics.  Most of the time just telling these people once will solve the problem (misunderstanding/confusing/didnt know that percocet was a C-2/etc)  however its the repeat offenders that worry me.  These people have prescriptive authority too, that makes my heart sad.  If you tell a dog to stop eating his own shit enough he eventually will learn.  Jury is still out however on these idiots.
  • I’m not going to get into the whole 30 day supply of medication.  The calendar is a vague and confusing thing, and depending on how you split it, saying that something needs to last 30 days could vary between a week to a few months.  I guess when you need a “Must Last 30 Days” warning on your Rx, your definition of a “day” can shift depending on how much of Prince Valiums cock you have sucked.
  • Copays.  You have been paying a $25 copay for the last 5 years, and every time you must argue with me and have me look up how much you have been paying in the past.  Surprisingly I come back with….. $25!  Thank you for wasting my time.  Double thank you for sitting there and arguing with me about it.
  • Trade name medication and DAW-1.  Patients still feel doctors are the magical do-as-I-say deities that everyone should listen to.  They feel that if the doctor writes DAW-1 on their Coreg Rx that the insurance company is forced to cover it.  No matter how many screen printouts of the insurance company saying “I DONT CARE ABOUT YOUR DAW-1” they still will sit there and argue with you about it.  They don’t wish to pay $100 for their medication, but feel the insurance company should because of a small checked box.
  • Everyone has heard the “Doctor told me to take this twice a day” as they come in with a new written Rx for the same drug at once a day.  They will sit there and argue that they were told twice a day despite you having a new Rx there showing it at once a day.  Once I even used the line “Since you aren’t going to listen to me or the doctor, you just take it however the hell you want, but doctor has here once a day and thats whats going on the bottle.”  Guess who got his ass chewed by the doctor for not taking it correctly, it wasn’t me!

When did they start putting lead in the water?

Comments #

Comment by The Ole’ Apothecary on 2007-11-09 18:54:58 -0800 #

I think the answer is that they don’t care about the part of your lecture that involves you. They only carea about the part of the lecture that involves them. They heard what you said, but they are just rejecting it. For example, they reject the “one year expiration date” part of what you said. They just know there are five refills. It’s stubbornness, not stupidity.

Comment by Stressed 2nd yr! on 2007-11-10 03:42:10 -0800 #

TAG!!
absolutely love reading your blog… esp at this time of yr, im a 1nd yr student from asutralia and its exam time at the moment, and those books are doing my head in! you should do a post about your time at uni and what you did during exam periods/uni.
your blog is a good stress reliever, love it 😀
except when it gives us students a tiny bit of a reality check as to what is waiting out there for us in a few yrs time… scarey I tell ya!!
Great work, keep it up!!! My classmates love ya!

Comment by Krissy on 2007-11-10 08:48:26 -0800 #

Today I had a lady come in and accuse me of withholding information from her… I did not inform her that she could be receiving “insurance benefits” from her AAA card. Why didn’t I tell her she could be saving money with it?? Why didn’t I or other pharmacist at my store ask her to see her AAA card, how could something like this happen?? I asked her if she had informed us that she was a AAA member, to which I got a “No, I shouldn’t have to.” I calmly explained we have no record of who has a AAA membership and that it is a prescription discount, not insurance, offered through AAA. I also told her that it was AAA’s responsibility (NOT MINE) to inform her of all of the benefits of being a member. And then she told me I didn’t need to be a smart ass. Love it.

Comment by John Roman on 2007-11-10 10:28:24 -0800 #

Here is a little tip about the year old rx thing. I have found its a lot easier to give someone a ” courtesy refill ” – its what I like to call it. And then tell them … they must call their doctor and/or have a new rx in hand or they will not be getting it again. Then regenerate the rx and put one of those ” this cannot be refilled stickers on “. Rewrite the rx as a phone in for audit purpose. Now this is providing its a non narcotic or something that may endanger the patient. Ya your breaking/bending the rules but it will make you day much nicer.

Comment by Pre-PharmD on 2007-11-10 15:08:00 -0800 #

My favorite memory from my retail days… When you do a stock check and have the bottle in your hand and say, “Okay sir, we have that in stock, so it will take us about 20 minutes to get it filled” and the customer can’t comprehend WHY it will take the eternity of 20 MINUTES! No matter how many times you explain that you have to enter everything into the computer, bill the insurance, check for interactions and dosage limits – not to mention do the same for the five people who came in before him – he simply cannot understand: “You have the pills in your hand right now, why can’t you give them to me?”
Sigh.

Comment by Hope on 2007-11-10 21:48:45 -0800 #

No fair stealing my ‘lead in the water’ line, dude! Although personally I now believe it’s all the prescription drugs in the water supply now…combined with all the lead China sends over in the toys/clothes/miniblinds/dogfood/you nameit.
All the more reason to consume mass quantities. Of scotch.

Comment by Shalom (R.Ph.) on 2007-11-11 09:06:35 -0800 #

Of course the best argument the patient can come up with is, “But I *need* it!”
Oh, you *need* it, that’s different. I thought you were only here to bust my hump and didn’t really need that refill, but if you *need* it, of course I’ll fill it.
Not.
How about this one. “It’ll be *your* fault if I get pregnant!” That one was a girl who was out of refills on her O.C. and her doctor was unavailable. Of course it was a Sunday. (It’s always a Sunday, because the manufacturers put “Sunday” at the first tablet in the pack, so they all start then. One Sunday I had an ObGyn on the phone, who the patient had insisted I had paged, ranting about this idiocy. She said, “That’s it, from now on I’m telling all my patients to start their packs on Monday, maybe that way they won’t bother me on the weekend.”) Um, how is it my fault? Leaving aside the negligence on your part for not noticing that you had no refills left until it was too late, am I the one in your bed? That was the one and only time in my career I ever used vulgar language to a patient: I said “You know what? Don’t f#ck, you won’t get pregnant.”
(OK, there was one other instance, I was trying to counsel a young lady from the inner city who wanted to know how she could tell if her boyfriend had a bleeding ulcer, and she’d never heard the word “stool” before, or other euphemisms like “moves his bowels”. Finally I gave up and used the good old four-letter Anglo-Saxon: that, she understood. Difference is, that time I wasn’t cussing, I was using the word in its technical meaning.)

Comment by Mark on 2007-11-11 13:20:50 -0800 #

Why don’t you get another job if you hate people so much?

Comment by Phrustrated Pharmacist on 2007-11-12 21:51:11 -0800 #

One of my favs is/are the people who utter “but my doctor wrote it on a ‘subscription’!” First, it’s PREscription (blank stare, but I feel better). Secondly, I understand he wrote Lactaid or some other retarded otc so you’ll remember, but a script with an otc name on it and nothing else is not valid. I like to tell them “he could write for chocolate pudding, but the insurance will fail to cover it simply because he wrote it on a specail piece of paper (blanker stare, but I feel better). Sound familiar?

Comment by LD/50LabRat on 2007-11-12 22:06:36 -0800 #

Oh my Gawd! My ribs hurt from laughing. My BIL is all your examples. I refuse to go with him while he gets his scripts filled because 1) he burns up a good 1 hour of time arguing over stupid bullshit with the staff. 2) after getting pissed off, BIL will then go to Sam’s or Walmart because “they are cheaper”, and harass that staff for 30 mins. Oh, he does have a $10 copay, “but that is still expensive.” How you don’t eat a gun by the end of the day dealing with those twits is beyond me.

Comment by Ralph on 2007-11-12 23:40:57 -0800 #

i here you brother…since when did 15 minutes become a long time….i would kill for 15 minutes to sit down and eat a warm meal.(all you gotta due is put 30 oills in a bottle, how long can that take)

Comment by “Talking Head” on 2007-11-13 08:38:50 -0800 #

TAP,
The problem is that in studies over the last two decades they have found the average IQ has actually dropped quite a bit. The last one I checked from Europe had the average IQ falling roughly 8-10 points since the late 80’s…
I think most of the people on this page, and yourself, would admit to having very, VERY few close friends… because the bottom line is, if you are an intelligent human being, you have no choice but to be disgusted by most of what you see in your day to day life.
I have to myself question where humanity’s stupidity will end, but I see no end in sight, until we blow ourselves off the face fo the fuckin earth anyway.
The frightening thing is… all the idiots in the country have just as many rights as we do… and can influence everything just as much as us… and vote…. Will it ever end?

Comment by Holly on 2007-11-13 09:49:56 -0800 #

here’s one you forgot, and one I especially love: if I can find out a drug’s chemical name, then it’s obviously available in generic and you are just lying to me to charge me a higher copay. Every drug has a chemical name
retards – Zocor has always been Simvastatin, but you were only able to get simvastatin once the patent for Zocor expired and the generic hit the market. Drives me insane, and I’ve seen MD’s guilty of the same thing!