Hello!

Hi, my name is Tina Lien, and I am a 4th year pharmacy student at the University of British Columbia. And my name is Billy Lin, a family medicine resident at UBC.

Welcome to episode 0 of what we hope to be a long and fruitful adventure, affectionately named: Family Pharm Podcast. (Pharm spelt with a PH, for pharmacy).

The Family Pharm Podcast will cover many priority topics in family medicine and community pharmacy, drawing from the "CFPC 99 topics" as well as topics from the pharmacy bible "Therapeutic Choices". We plan to summarize the established clinical guidelines that will be used for Canadian pharmacy, med school, and family medicine licensing exams, and we hope these would be a good review for practicing clinicians and pharmacists as well.

A sample of our priority topics include hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, asthma, and depression. Each podcast will present an approach to one of these diseases, including its diagnosis, common signs and symptoms, and the treatment choices including pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic options. We will include a review of the relevant drug classes associated with each disease as well.

Besides covering guidelines for exam preparation and general practice recommendations, when we feel more confident, we may also try to include evidence-based information especially if it conflicts with the guidelines. Things are always more interesting but much trickier when evidence and guidelines clash.  Given that we are strong believers in EBM, we do want to stay true to our scientific conscience whenever possible. Besides, if we don't shed light to some of the hot controversies, our colleagues and mentors in evidence-based practice might leave angry comments on iTunes Store, and we definitely don't want that!

This podcast will of course be purely educational. None of what we say here should be taken as medical advice, and don't assume the guidelines are always based on high quality evidence. I mean, even TC and UpToDate have this disclaimer, so please don’t take this student podcast as anything more than it is.

And what it is is a student podcast geared towards medical learners and pharmacy students, covering mostly guidelines and established clinical practices used by their exams. Occasionally, the podcast will be punctuated with EBM outbursts when we need an outlet. For a more regularly updated EBM podcast for primary care, we do recommend Mike and James' Best Sciences Medicine Podcast.

So that’s all for today! Please stay tuned, relax, and keep your eyes on the road. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.