The Hidden Cost of Managing Pain Without a Pain Pharmacist | TWIRx

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Hey, on This Week in Pharmacy, we are gonna be covering a special edition.

It's titled The Hidden Cost of Managing Pain Without a Pain Pharmacist. Shout out to Dr. Sing Ping Chow, PharmD, and Matthew Hermenau, PharmD. They're gonna be talking about, hey, what is the hidden cost of managing pain when you don't have a pharmacist involved? This is big, and it's prefacing a super opportunity for us to dig into pain management. Not sure if you guys heard of the Harmacy Debacle out on social media. On Instagram, it's happening on TikTok. Claudia Morandi, who's with the Dr. Patient Forum, she does some amazing work for pain management patients and advocacy for pain management patients. She took shots at pharmacists, and Shane Jereminski, our friend in pharmacy, Dr. Jereminski, has come to the defense of our profession, and I reached out to Claudia, who's been on the Pharmacy Podcast Network before, and she has agreed, along with her associate, to come on and talk with Shane, and we may have some special guests accompanying Shane that are not verified yet, but I want you to know you're going to want to tune in. This is going to be a big deal for us featuring this discussion. So today's discussion with regards to pharmacists who focus on pain management is a really good preface to this episode.

Hey, are you going to the NACDS, the National Association of Chained Drug Stores, Total Store Expo 2026 in Boston? We will be in Beantown covering the event as press. We'll be teamed up with First Databank in their booth. It's going to be a great time. If you're going to be in Boston, make sure you reach out to me. Make sure that you get scheduled in with the Pharmacy Podcast Networks podcast press coverage. Hey, we also have a special episode feature, second part of today's TWIRx, US. News Best Hospitals Report from US. News & World Report 2026-2027. We're going to go through what are the best hospitals out there right now and health systems out there. And are you working at one? If you are a pharmacist at one of these hospitals, actually, I'd like to hear from you. What makes a hospital system a good place to work at as a pharmacist?

Today is August 20th. I'm sorry, 20th. What am I saying? Today is August 7th, 2026

This is This Week in Pharmacy.

Sing Ping Chow (3:38)

Welcome back to another episode of You Know What? I've been thinking about what to call this series because I previously have another series called Opioid Conversion Book Club Series. And I'm thinking maybe I'm just going to call this Pain Conversation because what I'm really doing right now is to invite insiders in the field and have a really good conversation on what's happening in the pain management realm. And so today, I invited my friend who is also a pain management pharmacist who is working in a hospital right now. And he is a pro in pain management because we both passed the Bcpmp, which is the new board exam on pain management. I'm now going to steal his thunder. Hi, Matt. Welcome to our podcast.

Matthew Hermenau (4:25)

Thank you so much for having me, Sing Ping. Really excited to be here.

Sing Ping Chow (4:28)

Thank you. Pleasure is on me. So can you tell us about how you end up in pain management or, I guess, how do you choose pain management in the beginning?

Matthew Hermenau (4:36)

Yeah, of course. So it's kind of an interesting route. I took a more untraditional route that I love to share with students because everybody thinks you need to go right into a PGY2 after you finish pharmacy school or PGY1, then PGY2. But when I actually graduated school, I was working in retail pharmacy already, and I decided that I was going to stay in retail for a little bit and pay off some of my student loans because I was just more pressing at the time. I basically did that. I worked in retail for, in total of my life, I've almost worked in retail about eight years now. But at the time, I worked for about a year after school, 100 percent, as a retail pharmacist. And I kind of was hustling on the side, too, still trying to do a lot of publications and work with the really amazing antimicrobial stewardship team at the VA in Providence, Rhode Island, headed by now Dean Kerry LaPlante, a pharmacist out of University of Rhode Island.

So we were doing some manuscripts and I was really working hard to get published a lot, kind of get my foot into the door in a clinical way. And when I was working in retail pharmacy, I had a lot of interactions with patients for opioid use disorder as well as chronic pain. There was a clinic right down the street from us at the CVS that I worked at, that was mainly buprenorphine prescribing. So there were a lot of encounters I had with patients where it would be either patients getting like buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, or even sometimes like just like different counseling for chronic pain with like opioids for patients. So it was kind of a combination of that. And then during pharmacy school itself, one of my good friends and I, we actually worked on this proposal to send to professional sports teams.