Thanks for following my blog. I'm a couple of weeks into my family medicine rotation and have really hit the ground running. I think what has been helpful is my internal medicine rotation in particular, where you get sent out to interview and work up a new patient (which tend to be more complicated than the typical outpatient).
I felt too busy on my IM rotation to look up side-effects of drugs, and actually wasn't quizzed on them too much. But oftenly, I think back to the Chief of Medicine when he said to the interns on the team "Your job as an intern is to learn every side-effect of every medicine."
On my family rotation I've had more time to study up on the side-effects of medicines, and it really became clear how useful it can be when I was taking care of a psych patient today.
It's often too easy to treat things symptomatically, like a dry mouth. But then I was thinking "well, why is this patient without diabetes drinking so much water? Yes, they have this certain psychiatric diagnosis but..."
So I consulted one of my pocket books and saw that this medication they were on was associated with about 3 kinds of complaints: xerostomia, dizziness, fatigue. We ended up decreasing their dose of it, and encouraging to take one of the newer medicines they hadn't started yet (both medicines work synergistically).
I think you move up to practicing a higher level of medicine when you're taking into consideration every side effect, not just the obvious ones.
Polypharmacy becomes a really important aspect of geriatric medicine and psychiatry, so definitely read up on the side effects of every medicine you prescribe. It's never too early to start.
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