Meeting Mike, A Sports Pharmacist

Due to the increase in pre-competition testing, my work schedule was changed and I lost a day off. That was fine with me, as I want to do as much work as I can while I am here. The people I work with are so enjoyable, the athletes are friendly, and the atmosphere so exciting. After putting in a day's work, I met with Mike who is a pharmacist in the Los Angeles area who works for SportPharm, which services the USOC, as well as many professional and collegiate sports teams. He and his partner are the pharmacists for the US Olympic Team. How is that for an innovative pharmacy practice?! SportPharm is one of the places I take my sports pharmacy APPE students to, so they can learn about the dispensing and therapeutics side of sports pharmacy (My focus and expertise is on performance-enhancing drugs, drug testing and doping control.) Mike and I had a nice dinner together (Chinese food!), and we shared our experiences in Beijing. I will visit him again and see his setup with all the medications that he brought from the US. One of his important roles is to make certain that athletes are not prescribed medications that are on the IOC's banned substance list. Having a pharmacist in the loop would have prevented the prescribing error that occurred in Sydney, where the Romanian gymnast was stripped of her gold medal for a positive drug test after taking a tablet for cold symptoms from her physician that contained a banned stimulant (decongestant). It was an innocent prescribing error, but a costly one, and one that could have been prevented - not so different than other prescribing errors.