Getting a pet to take their medication is not an easy task. Many pet owners are familiar with stories like covering a pill in peanut butter just to find out the dog has licked the peanut butter off while avoiding the pill or the owner trying to pretend the pill is a treat just to see their pet ignore it completely.

Bernadine Cruz, DVM, a member of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), finds that between half and two-thirds of her clients prescribed medicine for their pets fall off after about six months. “In spite of their desire to help their pets maintain a high quality of life, they tend to have a low adherence rate,” she says. In fact, clients stop giving their pets certain medications as quickly as five or six days, she adds. As with adherence to human medication, this problem can be both dangerous and expensive. So what can a pharmacist do?

Do you remember the good ol’ days of simple print advertising? The days where you sought out publications that reached your target audience, paid for an ad, submitted something well-designed for the space provided. Next, customers saw your ad, loved your product, and ran to the nearest brick-and-mortar store to purchase it. Unfortunately, many of us reading this find such a simple approach laughable, and you vets may feel a little sad at the loss of the simpler times.

Maryland, May 11, 2015

Columbia - It’s a fact of life. Most children don’t like taking medicine because of how bad it tastes or because it has a flavor they just don’t like. With FLAVORx, pharmacists are able to customize the taste of children’s liquid medicine to his or her favorite flavor. The FLAVORx app lets a person see what the best taste options are specifically for children’s medication and quickly locate a nearby pharmacy that offers the FLAVORx service.

How a child perceives and understands illness depends greatly on their developmental age. Kids change remarkably through ages and stages, and it is extremely helpful for parents to recognize and understand the differences. I hope that by breaking down the stages below, I provide a little bit of insight to parents as to what children are actually capable of doing and understanding at these points of development. Hopefully parents can use this information as a guideline to structure age-appropriate conversations and efforts when dealing with their sick children.