Pharmacy Books

The book is full of mistakes. Faculty voted on this book without getting my vote.

On page 259 in Pharmacy Practice it states, "add 100 units Humulin Regular Insulin to D5W 500 mL @ 20 mL/hr". Insulin is for diabetics. Diabetics do not have the insulin to store and breakdown sugar. Why would we put the insulin into D5W (dextrose 5% in water). Dextrose is a SUGAR! The patient's blood sugar needs to be corrected quickly. Why would we put the insulin into 500 mL?!

On page 48 in Pharmacy Practice the label for gentamicin is wrong. It reads 20 mL=80 mg. It should read 2 mL=80 mg. Big difference.

The total number of errors is too numerous to mention.

I can hardly wait until Jan of 2008 when our contract will be up and we can return to our Mosby Pharmacy Technician textbook.

Don't buy this book. It a waste of $$.

The writing in this book is so poor, I could barely read it. There are typographical errors and poor sentence structure. Some mistakes I can't classify because the paragraph made no sense whatsoever! One page tells the reader to not touch the weights for a Class III balance scale with "bear" skin! I'd like to know if it's okay to touch it with sheep skin. A third grader should know that a "bear" is an animal and "bare" means no covering on the skin. I can't review the content of this book because the poor editing and writing made it so hard to understand.

This book seller took over 3 weeks to deliver and when I got the book the packaging was ripped open. I will say that customer service was great and sent me another book express delivery, but I had to pay to send the first book back because it was torn, which was not my fault.

Amazon never REMOVES anything from its listings! There are annual editions of this book available directly from the publisher, with a new one on the market every January. It's a handy-sized and inexpensive compilation of the California pharmacy laws and regulations; can't imagine how a pharmacy could operate without having the current laws and regulations (they change frighteningly often) at the fingertips of every working pharmacist.

The book was helpful as additional set of questions for practice. The test questions, however, were misleading and tricky, which was not true of the actual PCAT. Each section seemed to be written by a different person and there was no consistent method to the presentation of the material. The Biology section did not explain the answers at all, so there was no opportunity to learn from mistakes. Other sections were somewhat better. I found the study skills and test taking tips section to be of little or no value. The overview of the mechanisms that have been developed to describe how people learn was of no value at all.

The advertisement I read for this product stated that it included information about interactions with vitamins and food supplements. There's nothing like this in this volume. It says the same stuff, over and over. A lot of money for what's essentially boilerplate. It also weighs a ton. Save your money and buy The Pill Book.

IOWA BOARD OF MEDICAL EXAMINERS
PRESS RELEASE
For release, April 9, 2003


Cassim Igram, D.O., a 47 year-old physician from Batavia, Illinois, entered into a Settlement Agreement
with the Board to resolve pending disciplinary charges. Dr. Igram was charged with being disciplined by the
Illinois Medical Board. The Illinois Board accused Dr. Igram of engaging in unprofessional, unethical and
dishonorable conduct in his care and treatment of several individuals who sought nutritional consultation.
Dr. Igram was fined $4,000 and his Illinois medical license was placed on permanent and irrevocable
inactive status. Under the terms of the Iowa Settlement Agreement, Dr. Igram must provide the Board 90
days written notice and fully comply with any and all requirements established by the Iowa Board prior to
beginning the practice of medicine under his Iowa medical license.

As an Instructor and Pharmacist, I would not recommend anyone purchase this book as it is outdated and filled with poorly formatted tables (which encompass the majority of the book).

This text is neither a stimulating nor accurate source of information on pharmacy law and ethics. Look elsewhere.

I bought this CD in the hope that I will get rich insight of the topic. The content is but an article published earlier with no additional value. The CD is bent and could hardly run with big noise because it was labled with cheap paper sticker. I could not print nor copy paste the trivial information. You can get one code to run on one machine. If you change your machine, send the CD to trash. It belongs there.

It is too bad that there was nothing less than "1 star". I bought this drugbook to help me thru a pediatric rotation in nursing school. I dont think I was able to use it at all. Every drug that I attempted to look up WAS NOT in this book, it was useless and a total waste of money. I dont recommend anyone buying it. Im not sure who uses the drugs in this book because there useless. Even the most common pediatric meds are no where to be found! :(

HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors are essentially the statin drugs: atorvastatin (Lipitor™), cerivastatin (Baycol™,
withdrawn 8/01), fluvastatin (Lescol™), lovastatin (Mevacor™), pravastatin (Pravachol™), simvastatin (Zocor™),
pitavastatin and rosuvastatin (Crestor™), which were introduced to lower total cholesterol (TC) levels, and especially
LDL-cholesterol (LDL) levels, ostensibly to prevent coronary heart disease (CVD).

The book consists of 8 chapters by nominally highly qualified authors in the form of review articles of the sort
normally found in medical journals. These are devoted to the pharmacology and supposed benefits of statin drugs.
The writing is in expert medical language and is consistent, well-written, well-edited and very well-referenced, in
quantity if not in quality. The index is inadequate.

All chapters attempt to justify the wide use of the statin drugs to lower TC and LDL by citing references in support
of the claims that high levels have been correlated with cardiovascular disease (pp1,19,35,81,84,99,121,126). Such
claims are unfounded (Ravnskov U, The Cholesterol Myths, Washington, DC, New Trends, 2000).

The supposed benefits of the statins, beyond a large, but meaningless lowering of TC and LDL, are usually given
as lowered relative risks (RR) of mostly non-fatal heart attacks without the slightest indication of the magnitude of the
more meaningful reduction of absolute risk (pp101,103,106,115,122,124,137). This misrepresentation has been
noted (Ravnskov, 2000; Gigerenzer G, Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, New York,
NY, Simon & Schuster, 2002). So the usual tout of pravastatin in the WOSCOPS trial of a 22% drop in all-cause
mortality was noted without the information that this was only an 0.9% drop absolute in the 5-year trial period
(p106). The higher all-cause death rates in 2 of the big trials were ignored, as was the higher breast cancer rate (RR
= 1500%) in the CARE trial (Ravnskov, 2000).

Besides cancer, the other side effects of statins listed were incomplete, and should have included myalgia,
myopathy, polyneuropathy, liver and kidney damage, congestive heart failure and amnesia. Side-effects were said to
affect 2% of patients (p115-6) and 2-6% (p123). In fact, a recent review noted side-effects in 20% of patients above
the placebo rate, and no change whatever in the all-cause death rate for atorvastatin (Newman CB, Palmer G,
Silbershatz H, Szarek M. Safety of Atorvastatin Derived from Analysis of 44 Completed Trials in 9,416 Patients.
Am J Cardiol 2003;92:670-6).

Statins decrease the body's production of the essential coenzyme Q-10 and dolichol, among other things. This
was not mentioned as a problem in any chapter. While this was shown in one biochemical diagram (p65), it was not
in another (p82). Low Q-10 levels are strongly associated with congestive heart failure.

"Statins are contra-indicated during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The reason for this is that cholesterol is an
essential component for fetal development, including the synthesis of steroids and cell membranes" (p116). The
authors seem unable to comprehend that cell membranes, steroids and coenzyme Q-10 are needed by all humans.

The rare familial hypercholesterolemia, in which TC > 400 mg/dL, was represented as more deadly than it really
is (p99,111), (Ravnskov, 2000).

There was some recognition that statins operate to lower non-fatal heart attack rates by mechanisms other than
cholesterol lowering, but not that their desirable effect on thromboxane A2 is less than men can obtain with buffered
aspirin (p71), or that the desirable effect of raising nitric oxide (NO) levels is less than one can obtain with the
supplement L-arginine with no side-effects. There was no understanding that these effects of statins are independent
of initial or final TC or LDL levels (Nielsen JV. Serun lipid lowering and risk reduction? Where is the connection?
Br Med J Rapid Response, 19 Nov 01, to Kmietowicz Z. Statins are the new aspirin, Oxford researchers say. Br
Med J 2001;323:1145), and thus there is no way to determine who should be treated, or what the dose should be.

An entire chapter is devoted to the cost-benefits of statin use (p138ff). Since the use of statins for primary
prevention of CVD has been shown to increase all-cause mortality by 1% over a 10-year period (Jackson PR, et al.
Statins for primary prevention: at what coronary risk is safety assured? Br J Pharmacology 2001;52:439-446), and statins
have very little effect in secondary prevention, it would seem that there is no cost-benefit (Kauffman JM, "Do
Hypolipidemic Drugs Lower Medical Expenses?" Pharmacotherapy 2001;22(12),1583-1586).

This book may be of use for a pharmacologist looking for an overview, however narrow in outlook, with literature citations.

---Joel M. Kauffman, 6 Oct 03