Posts Tagged ‘Ryan Peterson’

This month at Happy Druggist on Karl Road, Kristie and the gang are joined by Ryan Peterson, a fourth-year pharmacy student from The Ohio State University’s College of Pharmacy.

Ryan will graduate in May 2020 and will then take the test to become a registered pharmacist.  Ryan will be at Karl Road throughout April, so please stop by and meet him while he is in the store.

Here is what Ryan tells us about himself:

My name is Ryan Peterson. I am a fourth-year pharmacy student at The Ohio State University’s College of Pharmacy.  I have the opportunity of completing my last APPE rotation at Happy Druggist on Karl Road.

I am originally from Springfield, Illinois.  I completed my undergraduate work at Illinois Wesleyan University majoring in psychology. I then moved to Bowling Green, Ohio to work on my Masters’ in behavioral neuroscience. My work primarily focused on the neurobiological substrates of spatial working memory in homing pigeons. I was originally planning on completing my PHD and going into academia, but I came to realize that while I immensely enjoyed much of the work I was doing, it would have almost no impact on those around me, and few could even understand what I was doing.

Seeking to do work that directly affected people, I decided to pursue pharmacy in a large part because of my fascination with how drugs interact with receptors within the brain. I think that it is amazing that by changing how neurons fire (or work) with a drug can vastly change how an individual’s mind works.  I took a few prerequisite courses at the University of Toledo and then transferred to OSU for my formal work.

Currently, I work at both Meijer pharmacy in Delaware and at Mount Carmel in Grove City. 

Over the course of my pharmacy education I have begun to appreciate how much of an effect a pharmacist can have on people’s lives in simple day to day interactions.  For example, I remember in my second year of pharmacy school when a patient came into my pharmacy looking for a medication to help with his cough that had been bothering him for over a month.  It was a week after our class had learned about the direct blood pressure medications. When I asked him what medications he was taking or anything he had tried, he told me one of the medications that he took was lisinopril. Lisinopril is a commonly prescribed medication used to treat high blood pressure, but it can cause the patient to develop a dry hacking cough that can only be treated by discontinuing the medication. When I asked the patient to describe his symptoms he told me that he had a dry cough and a tickle in the back of his throat.  I immediately put two and two together and told him that his cough was probably a side effect of the lisinopril that he was taking and then I told him that he should talk to his doctor about changing to a different medication instead of taking a cough suppressant.  He was incredibly grateful that I was able to explain to him what was causing him to cough so much and I found it incredibly rewarding that I could use what I have learned to make a simple but important effect on a patient’s life.

As I am rapping at the door of graduation within a month, my heart is pounding trying to figure out what I will do for future employment.  I hope my time at Happy Druggist might provide some insight into what type of pharmacy I’d like to eventually pursue.

In my free time, I enjoy biking as well as playing cards and games with friends and trying new beers. I love to watch Buckeye football and try to get to as many games as I can. Whenever I get a chance I love to go skiing.