THE POWER OF OBSERVATION

This is my first blog and I am pretty excited about it. Instead of going through the usual way of selecting a topic related to the pharmacy field I thought of penning down a few of my own experiences which can in a way be related to pharmacy. I have a three year old son and for obvious reasons children of this age are pretty naughty and inquisitive. One day I was teaching him the alphabets along with the pictures of the word they start with , for example A for Apple, B for Ball and so on. Suddenly he started becoming restless and I enquired the reason from him. He asked me "Mom, the letter A is there and the picture of the apple is there but where is 'for' in the book? I was quite surprised when he asked me this question as i was never bothered to think about it during my entire lifetime. He was asking me something abstract or something which I couldn't explain. I pondered over the question for quite a long time and couldn't come up with a suitable solution as I could not have explained him the importance of prepositions. I just told him that it is assumed to be there. But that obviously didn't appease my child's inquisitiveness. By this small incident i realised the importance of keen observation. Observation is something which should not only be inherent but also developed. Had it not been the keen observation of Sir Isaac Newton, the laws of gravity wouldn't have been discovered or for that matter Sir Alexander Fleming wouldn't have discovered penicillin.

As a pharmacist our role becomes even more important because we are supposed to be keen observers. This virtue is required in almost every facet of pharmacy be it drug development, reporting of any adverse drug events or any side effects or even a simple overdosage. We need to be very cautious and at the same time very observant regarding any change that matters because we are pharmacists and the health of the patients is at our hands.