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Post by gemmychess on Nov 6, 2015 8:49:13 GMT -5
Don't go to Pharma Medica. The staff is very rude and will not try to accommodate you in any way. It is either their way or take the highway. The blood draws are by stick and each study has a considerable amount of blood draws. If you value your veins steer clear of here.
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Post by gemmychess on Nov 6, 2015 13:36:41 GMT -5
You just described every clinic. Pharma Medica SUCKS!!!!! |
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Post by gemmychess on Nov 6, 2015 13:38:31 GMT -5
You just described every clinic. Pharma Medica SUCKS!!!!! PPD SUCKS!!!!!! PRA SUCKS!!!!! QUINTILES S UCKS!!!!!! VINCE & ASSOCIATES AND DR.
VINCE SUCKS!!!!! |
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Post by vark on Nov 9, 2015 17:28:28 GMT -5
perhaps you are preaching to the choir. be the first to review them on yelp. www.yelp.com/biz/pharma-medica-research-inc-saint-louis. i escaped last night after a month. it went ~ok~ but i am happy to be home. no improvements since i reviewed it a year ago. 2016 edit xkcd.com/1594/I am back for 3 weeks and will give an updated review sometime further into it. |
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Post by vark on Jan 22, 2016 19:58:44 GMT -5
Halfway through. maybe i'd be pushing my luck to do a review now in case it gets worse.
but it's going better than i expected based on past stays.
i just squeaked in because my blood pressure was a little high,and it keeps going up, because it's noisy and crowded in here.
but we have a good group and it's going pretty well.
the facility is like springfield or morgantown, a place designed for quick weekend studies that don't pay enough to come here for those, so when they do a longer better paying study they don't change anything, so it's really uncomfortable for a long stay.
some of the staff is great. i met the vice president and he's super cool. misses his family in canada. some of the staff like steve has been here thru the past 4 owners. some just started last week. they have very high staff turnover. if you are looking to get onto staff somewhere this would be where to do it. i thought about it because that's what i want to do, but not here.
however, the staff is not arranged well. the people with decision making ability dont come by often,and when you raise a complaint with someone who doesn't have decision making ability, you never hear back, it's a brick wall.
the food is actually pretty good. real silverware, well not silver but not plastic. most days it's chicken fixed in some new way. some days it's beef. we get the overcooked steak meal 6 times because the menu overlaps, but the pepper green beans were really good, not canned.
good salads, no iceberg, ok soups, fresh fruit at most meals. ginger ale or gatorade usually. cow's milk at breakfast, gross. the food is midamerican, not the kind of stuff i eat at home, but they are trying.
the inmates run the asylum. so we spend our time listening to murder porn or rap videos. meanwhile breathing fumes because one girl has set up a nail salon in one corner. i would say it's a hostile environment.
coming here i passed thru ferguson, and saw ads on buses recruiting for the study. so they get most of their subjects from the site of one of the worst race riots in recent history. same deal with parexel. missouri is 82% white, 50% male, but the studies here tend to be 2/3+% african-american males. i've spent just enough time in jail in my life to not care for that. i've heard "mother****er" 1000 times in the past 10 days - where i'm from that's fighting words, so it raises my blood pressure. feel free to call me a racist. we are in one big room, plus a bunkroom that's locked days, a cafeteria room that i sometimes get to use as a quiet room, and 3 one-hole bathrooms for the men which are normally kept locked. so if one guy's taking a shower, someone else is shaving, that leaves one for the 14 guys who need to piss. it's demeaning and pointless. the clients don't actually demand it although that's the excuse you'll get. we get a half day off each week, but i spend that doing laundry because there's no laundry facilities here. i mean of course there is, but they dont let you use it. our study is small enough that once the alternates went home, we all got bottom bunks who wanted them.
if they cared, they could the partition and give us twice the room and it wouldn't be so horribly crowded, but they don't. they think it would take one extra staff member to patrol a doubled area, and that's an expense they can cut by stacking us like sardines. prax was the same way at both its locations.
one of the guys had a side effect, so when he was reported it he was told he could get cut from the study,and he needs the money even worse than i do, so he was suddenly cured and feels great now. so do i.
i suspect that they tend to recruit blacks because they are less likely to demand legal rights and fair treatment.
i'm really trying to do a positive review here, but the stuff that irks me keeps creeping in. i have ear plugs in. i forgot to the walmart noisecancelling headphones. i did this nifty walmart netbook, which has longer battery life than my other computer, because you spend half the study sitting at your desk in a hard chair not able to reach an outlet. the computers here are pentium4s, which means they are 8 to 16 years old. 2 of them,and one doesn't work, but i got them to install chrome on the other one. i brought some books since they had a total of 4
including one i left here two years ago, but you'll probably be in a different clinic and if you ask them to bring over some books you'll get ignored. they assume we are functionally illiterate i guess. that;'s why the tv's always on. did i mention the tv's always on? bunk beds, so either the guy next to you snores, or he's on the phone at 4:30 am, so i just went ahead and got up. i suppose this is turning into a rant.
anyway, i needed the money, i'm doing my time, i'm actually more cheerful the past two days then i've been in a while. not getting much done on the work i brought with me to do, it's just not quiet enough and i have poor work habits.
edit: had a nice chat with B_, the cook. They make everything fresh here in house. He has 25 years experience and some culinary training and it shows. Nice guy. It's 4 or 5 meals that repeat, to keep costs down, and they are somewhat limited in ingredients and calorie counts and such, but they are good meals.
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mike
Moderator 
Posts: 334
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Post by mike on Jan 22, 2016 20:22:41 GMT -5
It's not racism, it's reality.
Of course the black people that you come across in studies is a subgroup that is going to have more troublemakers than the overall population; but that said, man oh man does the black community have problems.
Spend a few minutes around these people and you are not surprised at all that they are constantly going to prison/killing each other.
They are violent, confrontational, aggressive, LOUD, LOUD, LOUD, and immediately mind-blowingly racist towards any white male who looks in their general direction, while claiming that it is you who is the racist.
A month or two ago I was in a study, reflecting on the latest aggressively overreacting reaction I had seen from a young black male, and I thought, "Why do so many black people act like this, but NO white people act like this?"
But then it occured to me, there ARE white people who act like this: Batsh*t crazy certifiable white people who need to be on medication act like this. So in other words, about half the young black men I see in studies behave like people who should be locked up in a mental institution.
I'm sorry for the problems that the black community faces, but it's not my fault or my responsibility and I was sick and tired of it, like 10 years ago.
Black people need to get their sht together and stop pretending there is some big conspiracy against them, stop wallowing in victimhood.
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