notageek

Why yes, I did see What the Bleep do we Know a couple weeks back, and it did irritate me that many of those interviewed employed logical fallacies that I can recognize but not name, and I did think it long-jumped to conclusions, and I almost did want to point the two women in the hippie shop today to the Randi skewering of the Emoto “Talking to Water” pictures they were so reverently discussing about sharing with their clients.

But part of me is kind of disappointed that nobody has bothered, you know, just for kicks, to do a real double-blind version of “Talking to Water.” Because, you know, part of me really hopes there’s something to it. But even within the context of the movie in which I first saw the “experiment”, there’s several alternate routes explained for the body/mind connection–some of which, you know, are actually physiologically based and stuff. “Talking to Water” is a pretty story, but I think we can skim off the moral without swallowing the entire glass, ladies.

And it’s not that double-blind is THE standard to which I think everything should be held–I love placebos. The efficacy of placebos is, what, 25%? 30? That’s why drugs have to be better than them. I recognize the healing value that placebos can possess, but I wish that people didn’t need to pay $20 to Boiron so they can get their placebo effect.

Anyway. The hippie store. My doc wrote me an anti-anxiety script this morning to tide me over until my life has settled down a little, and while I appreciate the gesture and am getting it filled in case I work myself into a panic attack, I don’t really want to take it. So I went to the hippie store to look for some placebos.

During my interview at the pharmacy school I’m now waiting to hear from, I was asked about why patients come to the compounding pharmacy at which I work. I answered, of course, that we do a lot of stuff other pharmacies can’t: custom flavoured suspensions or emulsions; accomodating allergies; veterinary dosing; tweaking levels–but mostly bioidentical hormones. One of my interviewers pointed out that there’s a lot of debate over bioidentical hormones, and while I can’t speak directly to the efficacy of our bioidentical formulations, I can tell you that customers keep coming back, and that they tell their friends. I pack at least 4000 capsules of progesterone each month.

Whether bioidentical hormones offer superior benefits is debatable. Whether the patients in our care are happier that they are in our care, I feel, isn’t. It may just be that the pharmacists at our store listen. And that’s what the lady at the hippie store did for me. She also touched my feet and chanted a bit, but afterwards, I felt better. And I don’t really fucking care whether she just waved her hands and mumbled or if she was helping my heart chakra or whatever. I’ll take my placebo and run.

I might have momentarily fallen asleep on my bike on the way down the hill this morning. I can’t say, because I’m really not sure, but unless there’s heavy-duty construction and I have to do a lot of merging, that hill is generally the most exciting part of my commute. Sometime between finishing my Kingdom of Loathing turns last night and actually going to bed, I dropped into what Buggilicious might call a funk, but what I’m afraid might be too mild a term for that.

Once upon a time I quit going to class, slept all day, cried all night, and was generally very successful at making my life, and the lives of many of those around me, fucking miserable. I have no idea which, if any free-will crap figured into my downward drift, and likewise I’m not sure what pulled me out of it; I was just basking in my luckiness. But now that I’ve been there, I’m hypervigilant about my emotional altitude. Definitionally, any normal range of mood has a lower half, and I’m not worried about that; it’s when both ends of the range start competing in a hideous race to the bottom that they cross my alarm threshold.

I couldn’t sleep for a while last night, and while I woke up at 6:30 this morning I promptly fell back asleep and had dreams about losing my temper until 8. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I just need a weekend with no field trips and no visitors. Maybe I need a long hot bath and a nutritious dinner and some ibuprofen so the foot I banged into the file cabinet doesn’t hurt so damn much.

Maybe. I hope.

One of the requirements for passing intro psych classes–the class of the sort you have to take for pharmacy school–is participating in four hours of experiments, as a subject. They give you a lot of crappy rationalisation about the scientific validity of the practise, and how it’s an important part of the educational experience, but I think without us they would have a terrible time finding enough subjects, and that is really the only reason they continue.

Which is how I ended up spending three hours in a basement listening to Hindi syllables and clicking symbols in someone’s homebrew testing program. I have a psych exam in an hour, which I expect to be almost as interesting.

There are two compounding pharmacies in this city that I’m aware of, and I think we’re the only one that takes students on rotations. We get them, usually, three quarters every term, and they tend to hang around in the lab with the compounding techs and learn how to make a variety of stuff–suspensions, suppositories, caps, injectables, eyedrops, nasal spray, creams, gels–all that good stuff. Most of what we do is creams and capsules, so they get spared the brunt of that.

Because compounding pharmacies are relatively rare, we often take students for a day or a week so they can get some compounding exposure while they’re on a rotation at a retail pharmacy or a hospital nearby. Because I’m the most junior tech, I often make the ingredients used in large amount in other prescriptions–it’s boring, simple work that’s difficult to seriously mess up. It also leaves me time to explain what I’m doing to visiting students, who have never seen anyone blenderise canned tuna before and are fascinated.

My two bosses are of an age where they sometimes slip logs for their own hormone creams into the pile, and they are tired of running the entire business. They have not sold the pharmacy yet because they have not yet found a satisfactory buyer. One of them only half-jokingly reminds me that I am supposed to buy them when I am an R.Ph.

But I cannot buy the pharmacy when I come back from school, because I am a shitty-ass manager. I am not a people person at all–in my crisis intervention class, I fight the urge to use the phrase “find a cliff” when we are doing role-play simulations.

Apparently, last time we had a student I paid too much attention to the student and not enough to doing my dishes. My boss told me this in the monotone that indicates she’s just the messenger, and I think she may have seen “OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE” radiating above my head as she instructed me in the proper manner of cleaning the capsule machine.

My Wednesday co-worker coached me on how to deal with people who–like the Friday co-worker–want to feel important, as I stood at the counter packing another 300 progesterone 200 mg capsules. I, I realised, am going to be working in female-dominated workplaces for most of my career. Not the erudite, rarified atmosphere of a campus lab, but a plain ‘ol female dominated workplace–a lot like an office, except with a lot more chemicals but still plenty of drama. Briefly, I wished I had remained a physics major.

The other reason I cannot buy the pharmacy is that I will have STUDENT LOANS which are slightly higher priority.

I am working three mornings a week at the pharmacy these days–this means that in addition to getting paid for ten minutes of waiting for my bosses to drive over and let the morning-shift techs in, I get second pick (after the senior lab tech) of whatever food anyone throws to the wolves in the break room. The wolves, of course, being highly qualified technicians.

The lab tech I’m under is on one of the myriad low-carbohydrate diets, and one of my bosses is on no wheat, and another is on no-sugar, which means I often actually get first picks on the grazing. In fact, most of the techs are on some low-carb variant, which makes me wonder if they keep bringing baked goods in to try and sabotage each other. Maybe dieting is a zero-sum game.

The other day the breakroom was occupied by its usual bags of gelatine capsules, lunch-break soap-opera TV and technician duffel bags, but also the last three inches of a loaf of cinnamon raisin walnut bread from Great Harvest. And the heel of a butter quarter. I sawed off half the bread, buttered it thickly, and headed back towards the lab to run the math on a batch of capsules. A low-carb co-worker gaped. A low-fat co-worker blinked in disbelief.

“Whaf?” I demanded, wheatily. “I’m nof on a dief.” And I am not on a diet. I’m not even saying I’m not on a diet but “just avoiding sugar” or “just trying to eat healthier”. I’m not on a diet. At all. And my co-workers are really damn jealous.