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How Doctors Use Vitamin C Against Lead Poisoning
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, January 26, 2016. We hear about the hazards of lead. We know that lead poisoning can cause severe mental retardation. Lead has been clearly linked with Alzheimer’s disease. We have been told to avoid lead in our homes and in our water, and to clean up lead pollution of our environment.…
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MedsASSIST May Prove To Be A Useful Long Term Monitoring Tool
The MedsASSIST system, designed to monitor pharmacy sales of codeine products, has reached the stage of progressing to stage two of a pilot, involving approximately 150 pharmacies in the Newcastle and North Queensland regions. The system is being introduced because government was intending to reschedule codeine to schedule 4 (prescription only) status. Addiction to prescription…
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Blackmore’s New Flagship Store – Now There’s a Model for Pharmacy!
Blackmores have designed and opened an innovative flagship store that offers the complete wellbeing experience, with rooms for private consultations with qualified naturopaths, a modern ‘Mindful Ocean’ system to assess mindfulness, the Wellbeing Bar for food and drink tasting as well as offering the comprehensive Blackmores’ product range. Located on Level 5 of Westfield, Bondi Junction, the…
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Seth Godin Clarity – as applied to pharmacy
I have long been admired the mental agility of Seth Godin, the US marketing guru who was the author of an Internet transforming book titled “The Ideavirus”. Basically, he identified and predicted what has now come to pass, in that “word of mouth” would be displaced by “word of mouse”. His words reported further along…
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Collaboration- What does it mean for health professions?
The new “buzz” word floating around the health professions is “collaboration”. In the same breath it is linked to other expressions such as “patient-centred homes” or “patient-centred neighbourhoods”. But what does it all mean – particularly when referenced in respect of community pharmacy? Starting with the dictionary terminology we find collaboration means: 1. “the action…
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Taking the Initiative with Co-Pay
Chemist Warehouse, as you would have imagined, has taken the initiative to discount the co-pay for PBS prescriptions by $1.00. The impact on a retail pharmacy like the warehouse model is not quite the same as for a community pharmacy, because budgets for retail pharmacies are geared for lower profit percentages combined with higher turnover…
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A Home Doesn’t Need to Have a Single Roof – Because it Might Need to be a Neighbourhood
The “buzz words” floating around the newly discovered world of primary health care are “Patient-Centred Homes”, a concept where a focus is generated on a patient through a triage process where patients are provided an efficient sequential introduction to the health resource most required by those patients under the one roof. Results to date in…
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Shopping
In this ever-changing world we have constant disruption. Beliefs that we once held for marketing concepts are forever changing as consumers react to the environment around them. And the online environment, while having many presentations and converts, is an environment that community pharmacists have yet to fully embrace and conquer. Particularly in the portrayal of…
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Antibiotics – are we doing out bit?
Reduced antibiotic prescribing is associated with lower patient satisfaction on the national General Practice Patient Survey, according to a new study by King’s College London. The NHS GP Patient Survey is a component of the NHS Quality Outcomes Framework that informs GP’s pay-for-performance. Do we support our local GP’s decision not to prescribe an antibiotic?…
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Drug Overdose Increasing – Known Solutions Ignored
Dear Colleagues, BMJ article: increasing overdoses but they ignore known solutions (+ Hari TED talk). There is no more ‘final’ statistic regarding drug use than overdose deaths. And in England the official figures go back to Victorian times, then often involving opium, laudanum and other strong drugs including alcohol. The British Coroner’s Act of 1844…