Magazine
Desk
| June 8, 2003, Sunday
The Toxic
Pharmacist
By Robert Draper (NYT) 3111 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 ,
Page 83 , Column 1
LEAD PARAGRAPH
- He worked in an obscure little room, 9
feet by 9 feet. For several hours a day, he
sat in his white lab coat before a white
table in the center of the room, mixing
powders and creams in a sterile compartment
beneath a ventilator hood. The labor, though
humdrum, required great dexterity and care:
smoothing gritty chemicals into paste,
drawing precise dosages of toxins into
saline solutions and, in the end, creating
medications from scratch. For
nostalgia-prone types in the pharmacy
profession, drug compounding was something
of a lost art, conjuring up images of
cloaked and bearded apothecaries hunched
over foaming test tubes. Such romantic
notions held no sway over Robert Courtney.
He was, at the bottom of his soul, a man of
commerce.
His customers at Research Medical Tower
Pharmacy in Kansas City, Mo., had no inkling
of this. After Courtney would emerge from
the sterile compounding room with their
medications in hand, he greeted them with an
Old World civility that complemented his
fastidious haircut and the crisply
professional dress beneath his lab coat.
''What a gentleman,'' Delia Chelston
exclaimed to her husband after the
pharmacist offered her a seat while he
filled her prescription. Through her
oncologist, Chelston also received from
Courtney's pharmacy the chemotherapy
medication known as Taxol, which she was
taking to battle ovarian cancer. By early
2001, it dawned on her that she had been
experiencing none of the drug's crippling
side effects. After considering the spectrum
of possibilities, Chelston did as most
cancer patients would. She took the Taxol's
seeming benignness as an encouraging sign
that she was defeating the odds.
How multi-packs work: A
multi-pack is an archive package that saves
you money by allowing you to pre-purchase a
set number of articles in bulk at a reduced
price. You can then debit from your
multi-pack and quickly access articles from
the archive at your convenience over the
lifetime of the multi-pack.
Once you purchase an
article, you may view it as often as you
like over the next 90 days. Archive articles
do not include photos, charts or graphics
Click here to purchase article if you
already own an archive article pack.
|
