Mindmasterclass dot Com: Health and Medical Blog

Physicians, nurses and emergency responders work quickly in emergency situations to determine what is wrong with a patient and what needs to be done to help them. Many times this requires the administration of a medication.

It is imperative that the proper medication be administered in the correct dose. There have been too many instances of patients receiving too little or too much medication- or even worse the wrong medication, all of which can lead to disastrous results. In November 2007, the twin babies of actor Dennis Quaid received 1000 times the dose of heparin, a blood thinning medication, than they should have. Fortunately, the mistake did not result in the death of either infant, but it is reported that both experienced bleeding and required additional care.

Drug manufacturers have responded to issues such as what happened with the Quaid twins by changing the labels of different concentrations of heparin and placing large red warnings on the label of the vials. Hospitals have responded by providing for more automation of drug dispensing and reviewing and revising policies that are supposed to insure that mistakes do not occur.

A vital component of preventing medication errors must occur well before a medical professional sees patients – TRAINING. While all medical professionals receive training about medications and how to administer them, many times this training is performed with expired or re-labeled drug containers, or is just explained verbally, “I will administer 1 mg of epinephrine 1:1000, subcutaneously.”

When a medical professional has made a determination as to the proper drug to administer to a patient, they must then acquire the proper drug, in the proper concentration. It is important that medical professionals examine the label of the drug container to ascertain that it is the correct drug in the correct concentration, and that it is not expired. It is also important that they examine the drug itself to be sure that it is not discolored or contain contaminants such as crystals.

The most effective way to train medical professionals in medication administration is repetition. The more times they have to find the correct medication, read its label and examine the contents, the more they develop the habit to perform these critical tasks. The more ingrained the habit becomes; the more likely they are to perform it properly during an emergency. The goal of effective training in a skill such as this is to insure that it becomes an automatic process that will occur every time a procedure takes place.

As a medical training professional, my husband searched for an effective teaching tool that could be used to develop this critical process in paramedic students. Most educational programs rely on using expired medications, which is not legal in many areas, and which does not allow for the proper development of the habit of rejecting expired or adulterated medication. Others use “fresh” drugs which becomes quite expensive. Both expired drugs and “fresh” drugs introduce safety issues into medication administration training. A manikin filled with drugs can pose a great hazard to students if the “soup” of drugs leaks out.

After searching extensively for a safe, legal and effective means to teach this important skill, my husband was sorely frustrated due to the lack of an appropriate training aid. After listening to him complain time after time, I finally asked him why we couldn’t produce what he needed!

Months of research later, PharmProps, LLC was formed, offering  extremely realistic simulated  medication products that provide all of the necessary elements required for safe, effective medication administration training. As the picture shows, the simulated medications are quite realistic, but easily identifiable as training simulations due to the brightly colored labels and the inclusion of the “Training Use Only” and “Not For Human Use – Contains No Medication” tags. All of PharmProps products contain only water, for safety purposes.

Finally there is a product that will allow educators and trainers to address the medication administration training needs of medical professionals in a safe, legal and effective manner.

Progress in medical science has by a long way enhanced the health care rescue system in USA. One of the greatest performances has been the reductions and control of hospital acquired contagions. In this problem, disposable medical supplies have done a good job. By using disposable medical supplies USA, the risk of obtaining a secondary ailment while receiving cure in a health care facility has dropped radically.

Disposable medical products are the products designed for cheapness and short-term expediency somewhat medium to long-term durability, with most products only planned for single use. Toilet paper, wet wipes, paper towels, handkerchief, facial tissues, condoms and other contraception products are disposable products that are used for one time only. Other disposable medical supplies USA, that save life included enemas, cotton swabs, medical and cleaning gloves, baby as well as adult diapers, toothbrushes and dental floss. Disposable toilet paper products are used to uphold personal sanitation after human defection. Disposable medical gloves are medical safety accessories made of latex and powdered with cornstarch to grease the gloves, making them easier to use.

Safe and good medical instruments are the first choice of every doctor as well as medical products supplier. To cover the protection and happiness of patients, every medical institution and private healthcare organizations need to be eternally supply for proper medical equipments. Disposable, single use medical instruments such as containers or specula, reusable surgical instruments like surgical scissors, blades, tissue forceps, dilators and curettes medical instruments are extensively used in all medical facilities from various medical fields.

Other surgical instruments such as stands, trays and many others are also used in all medical facilities. Due to topical use of these accessories, disposable medical supplies in USA are requested in present. However proper and cost effective medical instruments are scarce resource, and reliable suppliers are very difficult to find. Disposable medical supplies are highly used products. They are manufactured to keep in mind the quality symbol and purity because this is the matter related to everyone’s life. Disposable medical supplies products are available online. For this, you are to search over internet and you will find many online suppliers who are supplying these types of products with affordable prices and a quality symbol. Modern hospitals depend on medical technology to diagnose, treat and prevent from disease. Disposable thermometers are calibrated to do the same thing in the form of dots.

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Timing your medication appropriately can be crucial to the success of any treatment regime whether it be to cure a life-threatening condition or simply to alleviate troublesome symptoms.

 

When best to take a medication depends on the active ingredient, what product form the medication is in, the nature and severity of the condition to be diagnosed, prevented or treated, as well as individual diet and lifestyle. The detailing that your doctor or pharmacist provides often centers on maximizing the effectiveness and safety of the medication.

 

Getting as much of the active ingredient to be absorbed into the body can be an important goal of correctly timing your medication. Some medication is better absorbed when taken with meals or specific foods while the absorption of others is inhibited when taken in the same way. Extremely little of an osteoporosis medication like Fosamax (alendronate) already ever gets into the body, let alone reaches the bones, under fasting conditions from a single dose. This medication needs to be taken with plain water and without food or other drink, weekly on the same day in an upright position upon first rising. Already more than 99% of a single dose will be excreted out of the body under such conditions and if the medication is taken with food or at other times during the day, the amount absorbed can be further reduced by half or more.

 

Some medications may be safer to take with food rather than on an empty stomach. In better assuring the long-term safety of a painkiller class of medications known as NSAIDs, it may be advisable to avoid taking the medication aspirin for instance, on an empty stomach and to either take the medication with or after food or together with an antacid.

 

Active ingredients can require a specific dose and timing strategy to be most effective. This is especially so for different types of antibiotics in treating infections. An antibiotic medication like cloxacillin may require four times a day dosing to maintain effective blood levels in treating a skin infection while ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic of a another class that acts differently, may only require once or twice a day dosing to treat a urinary tract infection.

 

The product form can play an important role in when and how often a medication is taken. Long-acting, delayed or sustained release preparations can work to release the active ingredients of a medication product differently or consistently throughout a day allowing the medication to be therapeutic despite being dosed only once instead of multiple times in a day. In managing blood pressure for instance, chronotherapeutic medication has been developed to work in tandem with the body’s natural circadian rhythms and in effect, to best tackle the peak blood pressure that tends to occur upon awakening. Innopran XL (propranolol) can be taken just once at night before sleeping. Technology allows the release of the medication’s active ingredient four hours after taking it, with resulting peak blood levels that coincide with the morning spike in blood pressure.

 

The nature of a medical condition can also help to determine when it is best to take a particular medication. Cholesterol is synthesized by the body, often during sleep in the night hence the arising notion that it may be most advantageous to dose cholesterol-lowering medication like Zocor (simvastatin) or Mevacor (lovastatin) in the evenings. Conditions like migraine, fever and gout may have acute symptoms that occur unpredictably and can often require medicating regardless of the time of day.

 

Incorporating individual diet and lifestyle patterns often facilitates compliance with taking medication and can be crucial to effectively treating a chronic condition like diabetes without unduly reducing quality of life. To best control the condition, insulin injections may be administered as well as oral medication taken before, with or after food to coincide with specific anticipated spikes in blood sugar levels. In consultation with the treating doctor, oral medication may be timed with meals or scheduled for consumption either consistently in the morning or the night to facilitate lifestyle and compliance.

 

When specific medications are used to moderate elements of diet and nutrition, taking these consistently with meals can be important to treatment success. A weight-loss medication like Xenical (orlistat) is often best taken with meals or times of food intake that involve the most consumption of fats as these get bound by the medication and are passed out from the body. The cholesterol-reducing medications colestipol and cholestyramine also act in a similar way and are best taken with meals.

 

Timing medication for best outcomes can be especially important when having to take five or more medications consistently. In such cases known as polypharmacy, it becomes increasingly important not just to match medicating with specific time slots before, with or after food, but also to space out the different medications appropriately so as to avoid negative interactions that could lead to ineffective medicating or even direct harm to health.

 

In timing your medication, discuss the various considerations with both your treating doctor and pharmacist. This will optimize a safe and effective medication regime and better your treatment outcomes.

Expired medications are commonplace and inertia notwithstanding, many of us tend to rely on an intuitive sense of their value in continuing to store and use them. Such drugs can be harmful to health in several ways; they can be unpredictable in effectiveness, simply ineffective, or even toxic.

 

The formal way of classifying a medication as having expired is through it’s labeled expiry date. This date is often set based on a combination of the common properties of the dosage form as well as the stability and expiration studies of the product that have been conducted by the manufacturer. Importantly, this expiry date is contingent on specific storage conditions of the product. Although a medication may pass it’s labeled expiry date, it may not necessarily be any less effective or dangerous to consume depending on the product itself, the storage conditions and the circumstances leading up to expiry.

 

When most medications pass their expiry date under appropriate storage conditions, they are generally taken to have become so variable in effectiveness as to have become unsuitable for use. This often comes about as a result of the degradation of the active ingredients of the medication with exposure to physical, chemical or microbiological variables like temperature, pressure, humidity, light, bacteria as well as other components of the product known as excipients.

 

Creams may “crack” once their expiry date is passed, leading to a separation of the components and hence provide a non-uniform delivery of active ingredients. This can lead to the poor control of conditions like eczema or acne. Tablet medications can mechanically “powder” off, change in consistency with exposure to water vapor or even experience the contained drug itself becoming ineffective on prolonged exposure to air as occurs with glyceryl trinitrate, an emergency medicine that can easily become ineffective in relieving acute symptoms of chest pain. With common injections, should the acidity change to fall outside a fairly narrow range, significant pain and tissue damage can result from use. With most eye drops, an expiry date of one month after opening is accepted to minimize the potential for dangerous bacterial contamination.

 

With any medication, once a specific threshold of remaining active ingredient is passed, the medication can no longer be relied upon to deliver accurate doses. This loss of reliability is often exacerbated by the fact that the active ingredients can degrade into various combinations of active, inactive or toxic breakdown products. The common aspirin is for instance, known to react with moisture to breakdown into salicylic acid, which is active, and acetic acid, which is inactive and can lead to toxicity in excess.

 

While the expiry date provides a useful gauge of when to stop using a medication, there are also many other factors that can informally accelerate the expiry of a medication and make it dangerous to use, chief among which is how the medication is stored. It is oftentimes not just the medication that is affected by storage conditions but also the storage container. Under inappropriate storage conditions, certain containers can leech material into liquid medication preparations, or medication particles can stick to the container rather than remain separated. On average, a 10 degree rise in temperature doubles the rate of chemical reactions that occur to a medication product and can accelerate the rate of bacterial contamination several fold. Just like an ice cream can simply melt or a loaf of bread becomes mouldy much quicker if not refrigerated, many medication products can easily expire much faster when not stored appropriately.

 

With oral liquid and topical medications, potentially dangerous changes associated with expiry can at times be detected by color or consistency changes, component separations, altered smell or taste (oral preparations). Should a suspicion of expiry arise, a medication expert should be consulted regardless of whether or not the labeled expiry date has been passed.

 

“Expiry” should also be understood to occur once a supply of medications is no longer used appropriately for it’s intended purpose. Consultation with a medication expert is always advised to prevent the inappropriate use of existing medication supplies. Inappropriate use can often occur with self-medication and is harmful. An unfinished supply of a previously used antibiotic may be tried to treat a new infection that is actually untreatable by or resistant to that antibiotic. This practice may not only delay recovery but can also encourage the proliferation of “super bugs” that have resistance to many antibiotics. Another incorrect purpose involves sharing medications and this can be especially harmful if another is allergic to the shared medication or a child or pet is medicated with an adult’s medication. Children often require dose adjustments to accommodate their size while many human drugs are often unsuitable for pets. Even a simple food like chocolate that we may enjoy can easily be toxic to a pet dog.

 

Another mechanism whereby medication expiry is dangerous occurs when an unfinished supply is used despite new information that points to increased precautions associated with the medication or that has led to it’s recall. An example is obtaining pain relief from a previous supply of a painkiller like Vioxx (rofecoxib) or Celebrex (celecoxib) in spite of an existing heart condition that is now known to relate to an increased risk of fatality under those circumstances of consumption.

 

Expired medications that are kept instead of discarded not only take up space but can actually discourage the appropriate use of new supplies in the treatment of illness. A medication cabinet, if not tended to regularly, could eventually contain more expired medications than viable ones and this can lead to the accidental consumption of an expired medication in place of a viable one. It is definitely advisable to clear the medication cabinet of expired medicaitons at least annually if not more often.

 

A further danger however, lies in how expired medications are disposed of. Expired medications and pharmaceutical byproducts can be harmful to the environment especially when they end up in our rivers and drinking water supply. Hormonal compounds like estrogen from birth control pills and patches as well as antibiotics have been linked to being flushed by individuals and institutions into sewage, draining largely unchanged and collecting in rivers and streams, then returning in tiny amounts into drinking water. Traces of antibiotics could worsen bacterial resistance while estrogens and other steroids are known to change the reproductive characteristics of fish. Even trace amounts of chemotherapy medications have emerged in tap water and this could be severely detrimental to the unborn babies of pregnant women who drink such water. The long-term impact on human health of medications in our rivers and drinking water is as yet unknown but no one would want to wait to find out. We can all play our part by inquiring on and using pharmacy or state-run programs for the disposal of expired medications instead of sending them down the sink or the toilet bowl.

 

A pharmacist is the expert of choice to approach in handling medication expiry and should be consulted if in doubt. As a general rule, it is always best to safeguard your own health and that of those around you by expeditiously and appropriately discarding all expired medications.

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