Hoy he probado algo nuevo en apothemary. WordPress ha convertido dos de mis entradas en una conversación en inglés y me ha sorprendido lo bien que suena.
En tres minutos, el episodio pasa de las primeras inyecciones de insulina de Leonard Thompson a una pregunta que forma parte de mi trabajo: ¿puedo notificar una sospecha de reacción adversa aunque todavía no sepa si la causó el medicamento?
Pip: Apothemary writes about pharmacy the way a good pharmacist actually thinks — carefully, with the history still attached.
Mara: This episode covers two territories: the chemistry behind insulin’s first successful injection, and what it means to report a drug reaction when you’re not even sure it was the drug.
Pip: Let’s start with the history — and the twelve days that changed everything.
The Twelve Days That Made Insulin Work
Mara: World Diabetes Day falls on November 14th because that’s when Frederick Banting was born — but the post asks us to slow down on a name that usually gets less attention: James Collip.
Pip: The post puts it plainly: “Lo que me interesa de esta historia es el trabajo que cabe en esas dos palabras, ‘extracto purificado.'”
Mara: What this means in practice is that Leonard Thompson’s first injection, on January 11th 1922, barely lowered his blood sugar and left an abscess. Twelve days later, Collip’s purified extract worked. Same idea, different chemistry, different outcome.
Pip: Purification is the whole story — and it almost gets skipped every time we tell it.
Mara: That gap between suspicion and proof turns out to matter in drug safety too.
A Suspicion Is Already Information
Pip: The post on medication reporting opens with a word that pharmacists use carefully: suspicion. The question it’s really asking is whether uncertainty disqualifies a report — and the answer is no.
Mara: The post is direct about this: “No estoy seguro de que haya sido el medicamento. Es una duda comprensible. Pero para notificar una posible reacción adversa no hace falta haber demostrado que el medicamento la ha causado.”
Pip: So the upshot is that a report doesn’t need to be a verdict. It’s a piece of evidence that gets studied alongside other reports and other data — the system does the weighing, not the individual notifier.
Mara: The post ties this to MedSafetyWeek, the annual campaign running November 2nd through 8th, which encourages patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals alike to report what they’ve observed. In Spain, that channel is NotificaRAM.
Pip: There’s something quietly significant about designing a system that accepts “I’m not sure” as a valid input.
Mara: The post frames it that way too — recognizing what we don’t know is described as part of doing the job well, not a failure of rigor. A single notification is one piece; the pattern emerges from the collection.
Pip: Which is not so different from Collip’s situation, really — working with incomplete information, trying to get the preparation right.
Mara: Two stories, same underlying logic: the gap between a first attempt and a working answer is where the real work happens.
Pip: And apparently, where the most interesting history lives. More next time.
