Other News 2006

Seeking Solutions
By Anna Boyle

Armon Neel isn’t an ordinary pharmacist. In fact, he doesn’t even fill prescriptions. He gets patients off of them.

Neel, 67, veered away from traditional pharmacology in 1977 to become a “senior care consultant.” He is in the business of improving lives through drug therapy management.

“People need to know about their therapy,” Neel said. “I’ve got a message to get out. There’s a better quality of life through drug therapy management.”

Neel said prescriptions are all about chemistry – the chemistry of how drugs interact with each other and of how they interact with a patient. Neel specializes in geriatric patients, and he said most doctors are prescribing the wrong drugs for them.

“There are certain drugs in geriatric patients that can’t be used,” he said. “They limit the life span of the patient. Even though (some drugs) work well younger patient, the chemistry changes. Drugs become lethal weapons instead of miracles that save lives.”

And that’s where Neel comes in. As a senior care consultant, he meets with patients who have become chronically ill, curious or desperate. He invites these patients back into a conference room located in his Griffin office, and he sits down and listens.

“They fill out forms, and then I ask them lots of questions,” Neel said. “I do a lot of testing to see their mental status, so I can take that and lay a tin plate over their drug therapy.”

Meaning he looks at every prescription drug his patient is taking while considering their physical condition, or chemistry. And he usually finds a situation that is both concerning and maddening. Almost all of his patients should not be on at least one of their daily prescriptions.

Neel recalled one patient who almost died from her prescription drugs. She was housed in an out-of-state nursing home, and her family transferred her to a nursing home in Tifton after she was given just 30 days to live. Neel happened to work with that facility, as he does with a number of nursing homes in Georgia. He reviewed the woman’s medical records and removed almost all of the medications she was on, and suddenly, she started getting better.

“She started getting out of bed and going out,” Neel said, “And her drug bill went from $1,100 a month to $70 a month.”

Unfortunately, this woman’s situation is not unusual. Neel recounted several instances in which prescription drugs caused more harm than good.

“Once you get to be 60 years old, your body automatically starts the deterioration of muscle tissue,” he said. “If you take statin drugs, it increases the destruction of muscle tissue, and it hastens your death. And what if you’re 65 years old and you don’t make the enzyme that (breaks down) a drug? You get all kinds of erratic behavior because the drug’s having an awful time of trying to find a way to get out.”

Neel said he takes about an hour and a half interviewing a client, and another hour and a half compiling a report on that patient’s medical condition. But a lot of times his work is ignored. Despite all the good he’s done for his clients, Neel said he runs into a lot or problems with local physicians.

“There’s an intolerance of what I do,” he said. “Some (doctors) do it with open arms, but you’ve got other physicians who think because I don’t have an M.D. behind my name, I don’t qualify to talk about drugs. That’s not true. I’ve spent a lot of time educating myself in geriatric disease states. That’s what I set out to do. That was my goal, to learn how to treat these folks.”

Neel, who treats about 1,000 patients across the United States, considers himself a rebel with a cause. When he first entered into drug therapy management, it was actually illegal.

“In 1966 I changed (Neel’s Pharmacy) over into a pharmacy office,” he said. “We had counseling rooms down the side. It was against the law, but I broke the law to do it. There was a national law that pharmacists couldn’t discuss medications with their patients.”

Neel said he was turned into the pharmaceutical board five or six times before the law was finally changed in 1990. But he stuck with it, and the law is on his side now. Medicare will even start covering counseling services like his in the next few years, something Neel views as a vital step in America’s health care.

“A clinical pharmacist knows a tremendous amount more about chemistry than a physician does,” he said. “And it is chemistry. I’m a firm believer in prescription drugs, but I’m a stickler to use the drugs you need and don’t use the drugs you don’t need. You can give back a good quality of life all by playing around with chemistry. And I thoroughly enjoy it.”