The Dose by Dr. Thea Blystone 🔈

“If this really works, why isn’t everyone doing it?”

I hear that question all the time from pharmacists. It’s a fair question. So in this bonus episode, I answer it two ways.

First, with what care management actually is: the same conversations you’ve been having at the pharmacy counter for years. Support, education, and accountability between office visits, with one extra step that gets you paid for it.

Second, with a 2 a.m. phone call from pharmacy school, when I told my mom I wanted to quit. She didn’t give me a pep talk. She gave me one sentence, told me to go to bed, and hung up.

Turns out she answered this question 25 years before anyone asked it.

🎙️ 6 minutes. Listen, then tell me: what’s the reason YOU haven’t started?

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There was an office I called constantly from the retail counter. Prior auths, prescriptions that didn't look right, whatever needed cleaning up on a Tuesday afternoon. I never thought of it as anything but my job.

Years later, when I decided to build my own practice and needed a physician to talk to, that's the office I called. They already knew me. They still didn't say yes right away. It took months of showing up, a physician who left the country for a month, and weeks where nothing moved at all.

In this episode, I share what happened next, the trust bucket I didn't know I'd been filling for years, and what a pharmacist I'm coaching found when she looked at her own "ordinary" work a little differently.

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I've known her for years. We worked beside each other at the hospital. So why, walking into her long-term care facility last week, did I feel like I might throw up? Eight years, 21 physician partners, hundreds of patients, and the butterflies still showed up right on schedule.

Monetize Your Expertise | ASCP Annual Meeting, National Harbor | Halloween Weekend Register Here

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A pharmacist told me she wanted to do something that made her light up when someone asked what she did for a living.

I repeated it back on the recording and then stopped talking. Eight years into building this, I didn't know that was the thing I'd been chasing the whole time.

She also had two conversations she called basic. One ended with a cardiologist offering her an open door and asking a question she couldn't answer.

What she said that I didn't see coming, and why the part that scares you isn't the part that's actually hard.

She couldn't answer the billing question. You don't have to be her.

I'm teaching Monetize Your Expertise live at the ASCP Annual Meeting — Thursday, October 29, at the Gaylord National in National Harbor, MD. Four hours in the room with me, plus the full home-study program and 10 hours of CE.

Use THEA500OFF for $500 off. You'll also need to be registered for the annual meeting.Register here: ASCP.com/CareMgmtCert

Registration closes well before October 29. Get your seat today!

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I walked in an hour early the day after Labor Day. The queue had been sitting for three days. I ate at 2:30.

Nobody counted that hour. Nobody counted the three days. And here’s the part that took me years to admit. I wasn’t counting it either.

Seven minutes on what it costs when your labor is invisible, and why the CMS proposal on the table right now makes this the wrong year to stay quiet about it.

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Last week I told you loyalty might be holding you in place, and then I ended the episode without giving you a single thing to do about it. This one fixes that.

Twenty percent of a working life is decided for you. The other eighty is how you answer it, and nobody in twenty years of pharmacy ever told me that part was mine.

Inside: the four questions I run every hard decision through, why you should write the do-not-want list first if the first question comes back blank, what I decided I actually wanted out of a floating shift, and the five-minute rule my kids can recite.

Take the assessment: tmrx.care/tbo-assessment

If this one lands, send it to the pharmacist you thought about while you were listening.

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When does loyalty stop being a strength and start keeping you stuck? Dr. Thea shares why she stayed in a pharmacy role for years after knowing it was no longer where she belonged. From gratitude and fear to the hidden cost of staying, this episode challenges pharmacists to look at what loyalty may really be costing them—and to ask a harder question: If “it could be worse” is the reason you’re staying, what could your career look like if you allowed yourself to believe it could be better?

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One patient. Four and a half years. More than 1,500 readings—and he couldn’t see a single one.

In this episode of The Dose, Dr. Thea Blystone shares how meeting one legally blind patient exactly where he was transformed his care. It’s a real-world look at what pharmacist-led care management can do when we simply show up, educate, support, and hold patients accountable.

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A Facebook post came across my feed: staff from Senator McCormick's office holding constituent hours in Meadville that morning. No appointment required.

Three hours later I was sitting at their table.

I didn't have talking points. I've lobbied in D.C. before and I'd rather have a root canal. I don't want a spotlight, I want to be left alone taking care of my community.

But CMS has proposed changes to remote patient monitoring that would make that a lot harder, and so far the only version of this work they've heard about is the bad apples.

In this episode: what it's like to walk into a room you have no business being in, why the oath we all took says show up anyway, and the one sentence that sat a Senate staffer back in his chair.

It wasn't pretty. It wasn't perfect. I did it anyways.

If you know a pharmacist who thinks nobody in Washington would listen to them, send them this one.

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Episode 11 challenges one of pharmacy's biggest myths: you don't need another title, certification, or provider status to make a real impact. Learn why influence—not authority—is what changes lives, grows opportunities, and helps you build the career you actually want.

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