I will be the person that fills your perscriptions and makes your IV infusions. I haven't even started college yet and they trust me with all of your pills and drugs. Think about that next time you go to a pharmacy.
Because your certification also grants you a grave responsibility (one that I'm surprised an 18yo is granted, frankly.) If you screw up, you are likely to be criminally liable, and unlike fully qualified health professionals, you will probably not be covered by a union defense organisation, meaning you will likely suffer the full brunt of the law unless you have access to a very expensive lawyer. Think about that when dispensing and formulating!
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I had a post all typed out by request, and then my connection got reset and I lost it D:
Let's try that again.
First things first, I'm obligated to include a disclaimer: none of what I am posting here is in my professional capacity.
As far as I know, in the US it's an FDA regulation that makes reporting every known potential side-effect of a medication mandatory, thus extending the length of an advert to twice its original size.
This legal obligation technically covers everything
known, which is to say that some kind of causation or association has been firmly established. There are criteria for this, the main ones being an established continuum that correlates the drug with the effect temporally, which is ideally reproducible. That said, to attempt to reproduce serious side-effects of drugs is unethical.
The side-effect profile of a drug is stratified into common, uncommon and rare. For example, for a common antidepressant like fluoxetine (Prozac), weight-gain and drowsiness is a common side-effect. (Funny how lethargy is a symptom of depression and the pill that stabilises it often causes worse lethargy). Suicide ideation is a rare side-effect. There are some hypotheses on why it does happen, for example related to motivation (people with major depressive disorder generally aren't motivated), but I can't comment on their validity as I don't know.
The difficulty with antidepressants and similar medications is that until recently, they were approved for use on an
empirical basis. That is to say that it was 'discovered' that they worked for a purpose, and on the basis of that they were recommended and marketed. This is as opposed to a
rational development, which is where the mechanism of action of a drug is understood and known, and subsequent generations of drugs are developed with specific goals in mind (for example, antibiotics are pretty much entirely rationally developed). The biochemistry and neuropsychiatry of behaviour isn't particularly well understood as of yet, the rational development of psychiatric drugs only truly beginning with the relatively recent clozapine (for schizophrenia), and the newer generation stuff. You can tell when somebody started their antidepressants etc. because of the age of the drug they were put on, but because of the empirical nature of treatment in that time, it's unwise to change them if the drug happens to be working and the side-effects tolerable, because, well, better the devil you know, than the devil you don't.
In short: the advertised side effects for those medications are scary because the list is long. You won't necessarily be affected by all, many, some or even any of them, but there is always a risk associated with taking just about any medication, and it's a legal requirement in the States to declare all of them in an advertisement (but not in Australia!) Furthermore, the commonly used psychiatric drugs are actually pretty mysterious and only now is knowledge beginning to catch up with accepted usage.
