The ability to successfully read concealed emotions through an individual’s body language is very important in all aspects of life. The skill has a wide application “from the board room to the bar-room to the bedroom”. Especially for anyone involved in a business dealing with people, such as Pharmacy, a sound knowledge of body language skills is a major advantage.

Community pharmacy practice

If there was ever a time you recorded incalculable losses in your premises, due to the pilfering habits of your staff (the presence of CCTV machines notwithstanding), then understanding of body language skills – as we shall be exploring in the next few months– will be of great value to you.

If you have ever been bothered about why a competing pharmacy has been doing better, despite your longstanding heritage in a locality, it could be that the owner has tapped into some essentials in body language, while your customer relationship method has been purely transactional.

Pharmaceutical marketing

Do you know how powerful it is to be able to say for sure that a particular customer (say, a doctor) isn’t prescribing your brand just by applying the knowledge of statement analysis? Wouldn’t it be nice if, as a medical representative, you can read the micro-expressions of the customer that keeps pretending to add value to your business, whereas you cannot track any significant benefit commensurate to your investment?

Industrial pharmacy

As a pharmacist in the quality assurance department, having an eye for details is non-negotiable, otherwise the company stands the risk of losing so much money, should it be found wanting in adhering to compliance rules. The Thalidomide experience of the 1960s was a tragic one. If only someone had paid more attention to details. How about getting hold of an art that can help boost your awareness and sensitivity above mediocre levels?

Pharmaceutical journalism

One key area in body language is deception detection whose foundation is rooted in paying keen attention to details. This ability is important in any journalist. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a tool kit with which you analyse statements (both written and verbal) adequately and then ask questions that help you uncover the real facts beneath a matter, which had hitherto been hidden?

Interpreting non-verbal signals

Your nonverbal signals express your emotional state. Your posture, whether walking, standing, or sitting can indicate if you are confident, relaxed, bored, or defensive. Facial expressions can show if you are happy, surprised, fearful, or disgusted, without even saying a word. Hand and leg movements can communicate nervousness, indecisiveness, and defensiveness.

The reason these non-verbal cues can show deception is because when a person knowingly tells a lie, it creates some degree of stress within, as a result of the build-up of stress hormone (cortisol) in the body. This stress will usually surface in the form of a body movement. This is similar to the principles that govern a polygraph test.

One major aspect of nonverbal communication is micro-expression detection. Micro-expressions are involuntary facial expressions caused by emotions. These tiny expressions can occur as fast as 1/15 of a second. While people may be able to fake some facial expressions, it is very difficult to control micro-expressions.

Human brain and limitations

Despite how powerful the human brain is, it has its own limitations. One major limitation is information assumption, also known as inattentive blindness. This inattentive blindness, for instance, is the reason a surgeon could forget a surgical tool inside the abdominal region of a patient who has just undergone surgery.

A student with a track record of diligence who attempted five questions, when, unknown to him, he was expected to answer six, simply suffered from inattentive blindness. If this happens regularly, you may call it carelessness; but if it does once in a blue moon, it is called inattentive blindness.

Unfortunately, no human brain has immunity against this phenomenon – not even those who are extra careful in the way they do things. The frequency can only be reduced to the barest minimum. Part of the essence of body language analysis is to help sharpen your skill in accurately deciphering non-verbal cues which cannot be easily picked up by an average person because of the limitations of the brain – and to come up with a mitigation plan that is deemed appropriate.

Detecting deception

Below are two key deception detection techniques:

1. Baseline discovery

The baseline of an individual refers to the default behaviour of a person. If you must decipher micro-expressions and body language gestures accurately, you must be able to identify what the baseline of the person in question is. For example, if a person is fond of folding his arms across his chest in most situations, it might be an error for anyone with a certain level of knowledge of body language to assume that the person is being defensive or not open to ideas, even though this gesture naturally suggests this.

Finding out the baseline helps you calibrate the individual and sieve gestures for proper interpretations. This means that, for anyone that is fond of doing a particular thing greater percentage of the time, the day you observe a deviation from that baseline behaviour it suggests that there is something wrong. This is called the probing point in body language. By asking the right questions, you can get to the knowledge of the truth.

2. Illustrators and manipulators

Illustrators are gestures that prove you are telling the truth. Manipulators are gestures indicative of deception. Anytime you observe that manipulators increase and illustrators decrease, then it’s a good sign of deception. However, this does not mean that the manifestation of one or two of these gestures automatically shows that a lie is somewhere around the corner. Deception detection demands a little more than just surface read of gestures.

Examples of manipulators are: lip-biting, mouth twitches, “hard swallow”, sweating even in cool weather, eye block, lip compress (showing a restrained emotional state), eye rub, increase in blinking rate, concealment of hands and fingers, throat clearing, scratching the back of the neck, hands touching the face, nose touch, earlobe rub, picking up of imaginary lint, etc. When a suspect is under pressure, the level of cortisol (stress hormone), increases in his body and a good number of these manipulators are involuntarily exhibited by him, which serve as indicators of deception, provided the baseline has been identified.

The nose, for example, contains erectile tissues which dilate when blood flows through them. This often occurs during excitement, pressure or anxiety and there usually is a response from the body of the individual by touching the nose. The reason you don’t touch your nose always is because you don’t have this process taking place all the time. Anything that puts you under pressure could cause you to touch the nose.

The next edition will be a build-up on this. Remember, whether you are speaking or not, your body keeps speaking.

(By Dr Lolu Ojo)

Let’s be blunt. Customers are the best judges of professionalism, not academic qualifications or certifying boards. Not everyone who practises a profession will be called a professional by the customers. And, while we may not all agree on who qualifies as a “professional”, most people know when they’ve been served by one. They also know when the person serving them, no matter the level of training and certification, is being less than ‘professional’ in their performance.

So, here’s a question for the pharmacist reading this article: Are you a true professional or just someone who has undergone the rigorous training and obtained the certifications to practice in this field? This is an important question with implications for the future of the pharmaceutical profession and other professional fields in Nigeria. My hope is that, as a society, we can start exploring, defining and re-discovering all the important attributes of a professional and injecting these back into all jobs.

A professional is more than someone ‘paid to undertake a specialized set of tasks’. He or she is,additionally, an expert with specialised knowledge base; a person with high standard of professional ethics, behaviour and work activities and; above all, an individual ‘who willingly adopts and consistently applies the knowledge, skills and values of a chosen profession’. The quality of being a professional, therefore, combines the basic knowledge in the chosen field with the attitudinal attributes of the person involved.

Character is the combination of qualities or features that distinguish an individual. It is the moral or ethical strength that defines the capacity, position or status or reputation of the person. It is the characteristic property that describes the apparent individual nature of something.

Integrity refers to the consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcomes. It is the inner sense of wholeness, the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of action. Honesty is ‘telling the truth to other people’ while INTEGRITY is ‘telling yourself the truth’.

With the definitions above, how do we discuss PROFESSIONAL CHARACTER AND INTEGRITY in Pharmacy? Are we true professionals who have willingly adopted and consistently applied the knowledge, skills and values of the pharmacy profession? What are we getting paid for: carrying out a specialised set of tasks with character and integrity OR simply for having a degree in Pharmacy?

The questions must also be directed to each of the technical groups or practice area in order for us to have a very clear view of the profession’s current situation:

1. Academics:
2. What do we teach and how is the knowledge measured?
3. What tools are we using to teach and under what environment is the teaching taking place?
4. Who are the teachers in terms of quality and quantity?
5. What is the quality of the university products? What kind of feedback are we getting?Do we even care for the feedbacks?
6. Is academic pharmacy only about teaching? Do we still do research?If yes, what research? To what purpose?
7. Are we really contributing to the world body of knowledge on drugs and their application?
8. Where is the Professional Character and Integrity in our practice?

2. Hospital and Administration:

• What do we do and how relevant are we to the hospital system?
• What will the system miss if we are not there?
• Which specialised set of tasks do we undertake?
• Do we seek new way(s) to do the job better?
• Can our job functions and duties pass the Professional Character and Integrity test?

3. Community:

• Are we community pharmacists or shop owners?
• Even as shop owners, what manner of service do we provide?
• When we work for non-pharmacists, what do we do?
• What work do we really do? Are we princes or servants in our father’s palace?
• Can our job functions and duties pass the Professional Character and Integrity test?

4. Industry:

• Industry, what industry? Do we exist in the world’s pharmaceutical map?
• What is our contribution to the national GDP?
• Who are the major players?
• Who is a superintendent pharmacist and what does he do?
• The market is so attractive but WHO are the beneficiaries?
• Who are the regulators and what is the direction of regulation?
• Can our job functions and duties pass the Professional Character and Integrity test?
• To move forward and become true professionals with character and integrity, we must get excellent at the basics:
  1. Ask yourself the right questions and be honest about your answers.
  2. Resolve to be a professional, a pharmacistwith character and integrity in whatever area of practice you find yourself.
  3. Refuse to be assimilated by a stagnating, deteriorating and decaying system.
  4. Stay above your environment. Update your knowledge, experience and exposure base.
  5. STOP comparing yourself to others as we easily do. It is a defeatist approach.
  6. Reach out to the young pharmacists to renew their faith and refresh the profession.
  7. Collectively, we must kill ‘REGISTER AND GO’ through a deep understanding of the concept, fishing out the people involved, rehabilitating them where applicable and applying the right disciplinary measures.

We are certainly on the right track and we will get there: Building a pharmacy profession with character and integrity in Nigeria.

God bless Pharmacy in Nigeria!

No fewer than 40 Pharmacy students were recently inducted into the Pharmacists Council of Nigeria (PCN) by the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ibadan, at a ceremony held at the school’s lecture theatre.

The glamorous occasion, which took place on 3 July, 2014, had several students, parents, pharmacists, pharmacy professors and members of the PCN in attendance.

Welcoming the audience to the institution’s 27th induction ceremony, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Isaac Adewole, who was represented by the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration) Prof. Emilolorun Ayelari, stressed that the past 30 years had seen the Pharmacy faculty develop into an enviable academy, due to its significant contribution to meeting the manpower needs of the nation’s pharmaceutical sector.

Prof. Adewole noted that the commitment of the faculty to excellence contributed toits recent establishment of the Centre for Drug Discovery, Development and Production (CDDDP) through the MacArthur Grant for Excellence.

On her part, Prof. Chinedum Peace Babalola, the first female dean of the faculty,congratulated the graduands and theirwell-wishers present at the ceremony.

She declared that the faculty had produced great professionals and currently houses great minds who have won laurels, grants and recognitions, locally and internationally.

While observing that the faculty was the only one teaching herbal medicine in Nigeria, Babalola urged other Pharmacy faculties to embrace the initiative.

Also applauding the graduands, PCN registrar, Pharm. Elijah Mohammed, charged them to discharge their duties professionally, as well as provide innovative services that would distinguish them.

Muhammed however lamented that it was quite unfortunate that brain drain had led to shortage of pharmacists in the nation’s pharmaceutical sector. He reassured the graduands that his administration would reposition Pharmacy registry for effective service delivery and institutionalisation of good pharmacy practice in Nigeria.

The highpoint of the event was the award of the much coveted PCN prize for the best graduating student, which was won by Abiola Adenike