Pharmacy

Pharmacy is the health science that studies the use of drugs in biological systems. The Pharmacy profession is charged with the safe and effective use of drug therapy. A practitioner of pharmacy is a pharmacist.

A pharmacy is also the location where drugs are dispensed. Pharmacies are located in both the community as a business, or in an institutional setting such as a hospital or nursing home.

Disciplines

Pharmacy is broken into many disciplines and practice areas.

• Pharmacology- how drugs interact with biological systems. This field encompasses pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics.
• Medicinal Chemistry- how drugs interact with biochemicals, and how drugs are discovered and created
• Pharmaceutics- how drugs dosage forms are made
• Pharmacy Practice- interactions with patients to optimize drug therapy

Within each field, and practitioner of pharmacy can specialize in a number of processes, from specific types of dosage forms, to specific types of diseases (cardiology or infectious disease for example), to specific drug families (examples: ACE inhibitors or fluroquinolones).

Practitioners

The usual practitioner of pharmacy is a pharmacist. A pharmacist is trained in a professional program for 6-8 years, and is then licensed in the state in which they practice. Pharmacists generally practice in a community or institutional (hosptial) setting, and are concerned with optimizing drug therapy in patients.

Ph. D. programs are also available in the field of pharmacy. These programs are often concerned with drug development.

Areas of Practice

Community Pharmacy

A community pharmacy is where pharmacists dispense drugs upon a medical prescription written by a physician or other prescriber. Pharmacists, with the help of pharmacy technicians, interpret prescriptions, organize them into a patient profile (usually computerized), submit the claim to the patients prescription insurance policy, fill the prescription ( compounding if necessary), and finally dispense the prescription the the patient. The pharmacist is responsible for checking drug interactions, verifying the drug is appropriate based on the patient's profile, and verifying the correct drugs are given, and educating the patient on the proper use of the medication.

Community pharmacies can specialize in a specific area. Some are compounding pharmacies, focused on providing on an individual basis a drug in a dosage form that is not commercially available.