Taifo Mahmud opens the incubator and, picking up the stacked petri dishes one by one, raises them to the light. Each round, lidded container displays a colorful pattern pocked or sprayed across the agar. The researcher points with pride to the branching abstractions of yellows and rusts, oranges and greens, the visible etchings of billions of microscopic bacteria multiplying in his Oregon State University lab.
Bi-Mart seems an unlikely springboard for social change. Yet tucked away in a corner of a store on the edge of Springfield, pharmacist Kathy Hahn is waging a militant campaign against pain.
“When you flood the body with oxytocin, the receptors might down-regulate to compensate. It’s quite feasible that this could be a culprit in autism.”
As soon as the story was out last winter, Chrissa Kioussi’s phone started to ring. People offered to send her their teeth or to volunteer in her study of tooth development.
Last fall’s announcement that virulent antibiotic-resistant staph infections had killed almost 19,000 patients in American hospitals and nursing homes in 2005 didn’t surprise George Allen.
No longer focused only on dispensing prescriptions, pharmacists increasingly serve as consultants and sometimes as lifelines for people with chronic illness — diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia. The hope is that as specialists in drug effectiveness and interactions, pharmacists can help stabilize lives and reduce hospital visits. For people with mental illness, that includes staying out of jails and homeless shelters.