Medical calculations, part 2, Veterinary Pharmacology
Hi this is dr. Herndon and this is part two of our review of medical calculations. In this post i will be explaining and demonstrating how to calculate a drug dose and how to calculate an amount of a drug that we're going to administer to a patient. In order to be able to do these calculations we need to know three things: you need to know the animal's body weight, the drug dosage rate, and the drug concentration. A word about the terms dose and dosage: these two terms are often used interchangeably. It's important to know the difference, and for our purposes a dose of a drug is what we're going to be calculating. It's the quantity of drug active ingredient that's delivered to a patient at one particular time. So you'll often see a drug dose written as 20 milligrams or 20 units. A dosage rate, however this is something we don't have to calculate. A dosage rate is going to be given either in the veterinarian's ...