Pharmacists Play a Crucial Role in Helping Patients Manage HIV and Diabetes

Carl Grunfeld, MD, PhD, explains the importance of pharmacists in treating patients with diabetes and HIV, and how they can help them manage these conditions better.

Transcript:

Carl Grunfeld, MD, PhD: Pharmacists are absolutely essential in helping patients with HIV manage their diabetes and their hyperlipidemia. Many HIV medications have drug-drug interactions with diabetes medicines and with lipid lowering medicines. There are now dozens of HIV medicines, so knowing which medicines from HIV affect which diabetes medicines and which lipid medicines is essential. We rely on the pharmacist who is full time in our HIV clinics to help us with that, with those interactions. We also use the computer to do it when we can, however, its a moving field, new interactions are discovered all the time. Therefore, a pharmacist who keeps up on the literature is absolutely essential to patient care.