The importance of learning about natural therapies...

For my final blog posting of the course, I wanted to take the opportunity to express my gratitude for the instruction on the use of Natural Standard. As someone who works in a chain retail pharmacy with a fairly well-stocked herbal and natural remedies area, I can tell you that I get a lot of questions concerning the various herbal and natural products that we stock. It's important that we as pharmacists have a trusted resource we can turn to when we get these questions, since there are too many different herbal and natural products out there to expect a pharmacist to be able to keep track of. While there is still much to be desired in the field of research concerning the safety and efficacy of these products, a site like Natural Standard is probably the best we have, and is nonetheless very helpful. I particularly like the feature of "letter grading" the levels of evidence concerning the various uses of herbals, as it provides a quick and easy way to assess the efficacy of these products. I also appreciate different monographs will different levels of detail. Often times in a retail pharmacy there is not a lot of time to pore into the details of a certain herbal product, and so the quick monograph would be a lot more helpful in that situation. However, if one has time and wished to go more in-depth, that option is available as well. In addition, you can also print off handouts in layman's terms to give to patients so that they can better understand a given herbal or natural product.

In short, while there is still a lot of research that needs to be done on herbal and natural products to more fully understand their effects, in the meantime resources like this are very important for pharmacists and other clinicians to help their patients. I am glad for the opportunity to learn about this product, and look forward to using it in the future.

World AIDS Day - Test everyone over 13

In commemoration of World AIDS Day, I decided to post this article from WebMD, talking about new recommendations from the American College of Physicians (ACP) stating that physicians should offer routine HIV testing to all patients over the age of 13. Given that HIV screening has become very inexpensive and reliable, this recommendation makes a lot of sense. We have made great strides in treating HIV, but the best treatment is always prevention, and by encouraging all young people to get themselves tested, we can reduce the transmission of the disease drastically. We as health care students and professors should recognize the risks of contracting HIV, and set an example for our students and patients by getting tested ourselves and encouraging others to do so.

I also found it interesting that they chose to release these new guidelines today, on World AIDS Day. It's an important way for the medical community to do their parts to raise awareness of this disease, so that hopefully one day no one will ever become infected with the disease.