Today we broke off into three groups. I was placed in a group of seven students that went to a community pharmacy. We got to speak to the owners son who told us all about how community pharmacy works in Thailand. Some prominent differences include that they do not need prescriptions from doctors for many things that we would need a prescription for in the states such as antibiotics, birth control, and even pain relievers such as Tramadol (which is a controlled substance in the US). They do 'control' these medications but everything is written down so there is no way to stop a person from going from one pharmacy to the next since there's not a central database. They also had students of their own on their rotations and we got to learn all about how their programs work. It is actually very similarly set up to ours! After lunch we broke off into even smaller groups and myself and Brittany went with two Thailand students to do home visits with local Thai people. This was for sure the highlight of the trip thus far. As pharmacists, they are very hands-on which is very different from the US. We went into five different patients homes and took their blood pressure and/or blood glucose depending on what their diagnosis was. We spoke with one man who was unwilling to take his Type 2 Diabetes medication. He had a friend who had used an herbal product that supposedly cured his cancer, so this man thought it would cure his diabetes too. Every patient we saw lived in a little small house that did have electricity and even some had TVs. It was such a great experience to see how pharmacists in Thailand work, and to interact with actual patients.
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