Pharmacist Care Helps Reduce Blood Pressure, Study Finds

A new study published in the Archives on Internal Medicine has found that talking with a pharmacist helped reduce patients' high blood pressure. Enhanced pharmacist care reduced patients' risk of stroke by 30% and risk of heart attack by 23%, the study found.

A major obstacle to heart health, says Dr. Ross Tsuyuki, the primary author of the study, is patients' failure to take medication properly. Counseling and follow-up care from pharmacists not only helps patients take their medication more accurately, but can also teach patients about lifestyle changes that can make their course of care more effective.

Pharmacists today feel pressured to fill company quotas and often cut patient care in order to work faster. As the Edmonton Journal explains:

Their wages come solely from dispensing drugs, so devoting time and energy to find the diabetic patients in their computer systems, phone them individually and invite them in for blood-pressure checks is challenging, he said. That payment system needs to change.

Pharmacists' care drops blood pressure: study [Edmonton Journal (Canada)]

Meet Ray F.

My name is Ray Funatsu and I've been a pharmacist since 1963. In '74 I started working as a manager with Sav-on until '94; that's when I stepped down because it got to be a little too much. I worked until 2000 and retired and now I'm on-call.