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Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills 2: Mr Dispenser


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Community pharmacy can be a pretty lonely career at times. It can be a horrendously stressful and pressured environment to work in. It can also be hysterically funny, and those times often make the rest of it worthwhile. In a workplace that is ultimately centred around illness, the pinpricks of hilarity become all the more important.


Its good, then, that someone decided to make a book of all those funny moments that happen in the average pharmacy day. Its even better when they decide to do so twice. Enter the second instalment of Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills by fellow anonymous pharmacist Mr Dispenser.

Those of us pharmacy types who use (for which read obsessively depend on) Twitter or who read any pharmacy magazines will no doubt be aware of Mr Dispenser, who is a regular day-brightener with his wit and humour. 

Bad Pharma


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I recently wrote a review of Ben Goldacre's latest book, Bad Pharma, for Medical Writing, the journal of the European Medical Writers Association. That review is reproduced below.

By Ben Goldacre, published by Fourth Estate, 2012. ISBN 978-0-00-735074-2 (paperback) 448 Pages. £13.99

Bad Pharma is the latest book by the well known anti-quackery campaigner Ben Goldacre, and attempts to explain to us that medicine is broken. Despite the title, he criticises not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also regulators, doctors, academic clinical researchers, ethics committees, and various other players in the world of clinical research. His take home message (I don’t think a spoiler alert is really needed here!) is that we simply can't trust the evidence that we see about the efficacy and safety of drugs in common use.