After years of being lied to, do pharmacists lose the ability to recognise the truth when we hear it, wonders Fintan Moore
I assume that by now pretty much everybody in the country has watched the reality(?) gameshow television programme The Traitors, or is at least familiar with the premise, but just in case, I’ll give a quick ABC.
A group of about 20 people, mostly strangers to each other, are assembled in a castle. Of the group, three of them are secretly designated as ‘Traitors’, and the remainder are the ‘Faithfuls’.
Each night, the Traitors have a clandestine meeting and select a faithful to ‘murder’, and that victim
is eliminated from the game. Over the course of about 10 episodes, the Faithfuls have to guess who the Traitors are, and each evening a vote is held in which they pick somebody they think is guilty and banish them from the castle. Before leaving, the banished person reveals if they are
a Traitor or not. It’s all a bit silly, but very entertaining.
What’s interesting as well as fun, is that because the Faithfuls have no concrete evidence on how to identify who’s a Traitor, the game revolves around lying, or trying to identify who is lying, and persuading others of your argument. In theory, you would expect people from certain backgrounds and occupations to have some kind of edge, but in reality that doesn’t seem to pan- out. In the current UK series, there was a retired senior police officer who was spectacularly wrong in every assessment she made of
guilt or innocence, to an extent that would make you fear for the English justice system. A psychologist probably did even worse than she’d have managed by rolling a dice.
A barrister managed to correctly guess the identity of a Traitor, but in the effort of trying to convince everyone else of her case, she ended up seeming almost unhinged and got banished herself.
So, I don’t know if any version of the show has ever featured a pharmacist and how they got on if it did, but as a profession, do we possess any potentially useful experience? We tend to be fundamentally honest but the occasional minor lies are necessary — for instance, the classic ‘I’m terribly sorry we don’t have that in, Mrs Murphy, we did order it but there was a problem with the wholesaler and it won’t arrive until tomorrow’. Or, ‘That particular generic isn’t available, but we do have this one’. And for the people with
the dodgy prescriptions at a minute to closing time, ‘I’m sorry – we’ve no Dalmane or Diazepam in stock — do you want to call back tomorrow or the day after?’ Always with a sweet smile.
On the other side of the coin, we get lied to all the time… ‘I’ve been ringing the doctor all morning’ (dialled twice, if even); ‘My granny over in England’s after dying’ (again); ‘The tablets weren’t in the bag/box/vial’ (after I swallowed or sold them); ‘I only take the one at night’ (on any night ending with a ‘y’); ‘I’ll drop the money in on Friday’ (or maybe some other distant Friday). The list goes on.
To be honest, I think our problem on The Traitors might be that we’ve probably lost the ability to believe when we hear the truth. Oddly enough though, I once had a patient tell me that her Rottweiler had chewed her sleeping tablets, and I think she was being honest.
Taking a break
Over the years, I’ve tended to be pretty fortunate when it comes to injuries, despite occasionally pushing my luck when it comes to sports. During three decades of mountain biking I’ve had plenty of cuts, scrapes and bruises, with occasional soft tissue sprains and strains, but never broke a bone for certain — there was a rib I might have cracked, but there was no point in x-raying it. My luck finally ran out a couple of days ago,
Oddly enough, I once had a patient tell me that her Rottweiler had chewed her sleeping tablets, and I think
she was being honest
not on a bike but in a yoga studio. I slipped on a smooth wooden floor and ended up with an avulsion fracture of a wrist bone — the triquetrum, which was one I hadn’t heard of before. So, I’m in a cast as I write this. It’s a bit awkward to type, but I’ve got full use of fingers and thumb, so I can manage.
It did get me to thinking that pharmacy is not the worst job in the world to do while nursing an injury. I won’t be able to lift and shift heavy- ish boxes for a couple of weeks but as long as I can operate a keyboard, I can function. I reckon a pharmacist could still work even with one hand if necessary. Damaging a lower limb could actually be more problematic because moving around needs crutches, which leaves the person’s hands out of action, but nowadays a pharmacist could easily spend
long periods of time just sitting at a PC processing Healthmails, running off prescriptions, doing paperwork, sending orders, fielding phone calls, etc. As long as it’s physically possible to keep drinking cups of tea, we’ll find a way to do the job.
Fintan Moore graduated as a pharmacist in 1990 from TCD and currently runs a pharmacy in Clondalkin. His email address is: greenparkpharmacy @gmail.com.
