Welcome to Helix Talk, a podcast presented by the Rosalind Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

We're hoping that our real-life clinical pearls and discussions will help you stay up to date and improve your pharmacy knowledge.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is

not professional advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified

health care provider. And now, on to the show. Welcome to Helix Talk episode 38. I'm your co-host,

Dr. Cain. I'm Dr. Schumann. And I'm Dr. Patel. And today we're talking about a new

drug therapy, a whole new drug class just for insomnia. Yeah, so just to go over a little bit of an

overview, as many of you know, sleep is a big issue, but for anyone working in outpatient pharmacies

or retail pharmacy, anywhere, it's something that people come asking about herbal

medications for prescription medications for a lot of things. And we know that even looking at some

of the branded medications in their sales through June of 2015 sales of Ambien CR, the one of the

brand name products available for sleep, total46 million just in just in that time

period alone and it's sort of one of the top 100 medications and that's very

interesting you know like nowadays we say there is an app for that or there is a

pill for that and I feel like instead of really tackling what's really going on

patients life that's keeping them from sleeping properly, doctors

just usually throw medications at them.

It's like, try this, you know, that they don't enforce the sleep hygiene, the education

that's needed.

And these meds, as we will talk, are not benign.

They carry a lot of side effects.

And it's a complete aside, but I think smoking cessation is often the same way of

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