Nuclear Pharmacist Essay

I have known what a pharmacist is for a very long time. It was easy for me to understand what a pharmacist is because of my father who is a veterinarian. It was fairly simply to correlate between the two because my dad gives medicine to animals and pharmacists give medicine to people. This was my understanding as a child. As I grew older and began to understand more things, I happened upon the career term “Nuclear Pharmacist”. I knew what a pharmacist was and I know that the “nuclear” part probably had something to do with radiation, but this was all I knew.

When I was young, my great-grandma was diagnosed with colon cancer. I was never told outright that this is what she had, but I knew that something was wrong with my grandma and it scared me. She was taken to the hospital at one point and stayed there until she passed away about a
(PDF. 1) As a nuclear pharmacist, the work you do could quite literally mean the difference between life and death for someone. Because of this, nuclear pharmacists are often required to work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays. They also do not do much travelling unless it is their job to port medicines from a company or clinic to a hospital. The medicine nuclear pharmacists handle is called a radiopharmaceutical. Handling radiopharmaceuticals expose the pharmacists to radioactive materials which can arebe harmful if not monitored safely. In the workplace, nuclear pharmacists use what are called ring badges and body badges which monitor extremity and whole body exposure to the radioactive materials they use. The government has set special limits, for the pharmacist’s safety, as to how much radiation they can be exposed to. Most companies will often have even stricter limits and will also hire a “Radiation Safety Officer” who is in charge of overall safety at the pharmacy. (Utah Futures. Spiriva