Tuesday 18 November 2008

Some Health Hero!

I was reading the Boots magazine the other day and came upon this – about their pharmacists:
High Street Health Heroes
[They can] advise on vitamins and supplements:
we can assess your age and lifestyle and advise on what nutrients you might be missing from your diet.
Ha! They can advise me on what vitamins to take, can they? So why is it that when I asked a Boots pharmacist about a good, easily digestible brand of vitamin C (because I have IBS and can’t have things like citric acid, an ingredient of effervescent tablets, which are supposed to be the easiest to assimilate), he looked like he hadn’t understood the question, hesitated and then mumbled, ‘But citric acid is vitamin C!’ I answered, ‘With respect, vitamin C is ascorbic acid, not citric acid.’

Actually, I didn’t say ‘with respect’ because I had instantly lost all respect for him. I told him to look it up, and walked away. His two assistants had witnessed the encounter and I expect they didn’t have much respect for him either after that.

Slap!

4 comments:

  1. Yep! He was the pharmacist on duty that day. One shudders at the thought of what other nonsense he's been telling people, doesn't one? (I was thinking of reporting him to the Boots head office, actually: he could be 'dangerous'.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've never found the pharmacist had anything useful to say about anything. Except once, in Tesco - we had a useful discussion about whether a drug I had been prescribed would clash with an over-the-counter one I wanted to take. She had a big book and looked it up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I remember the little old man in Westbourne Grove (the predecessor to the pharmacist who showered me with samples last year) saying repeatedly to me once, years ago, 'I can't see anything!', when I pointed to a huge red spot on one of my eyelids. Useless is not even the word...

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.