From:
Sukie Crandall
Date: 2011-02-19 17:37:23 UTC
Subject: [ferrethealth] When comparing doses or prices of liquid medications giving the volume alone is not enough
To: FML List <ferret-l@LISTSERV.FERRETMAILINGLIST.ORG>
It's like knowing the dose the ferret is getting. Without having the concentration it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how much medication is present.
I don't know what the current readily available concentrations of prednisolone are but they had been:
1mg/ml,
3mg/ml,
5 mg/ml,
7mg/ml, and
10 mg/ml
Compounded meds can be of other concentrations.
Think of this like muddy water. You might have a thin but tinted water due to a little bit of soil being in there or you can have something thick which has a lot of soil in the same amount of water.
So, too, medications with a variety of concentrations. The more concentrated the medication is (the more mg --which is weight of medication -- per ml -- which is the liquid volume measure, i.e. how much space the liquid takes up) the more medication there is in it.
An ml of 10 mg/ml Prednisolone has twice as much medication in it as an ml of 5 mg/ml Prednisolone.
An ml of 3/mg/ml Prednisolone has three times as much medication in it as an ml of 1 mg/ml Prednisolone.
BTW, look at BOTH numbers. The numeral "1" can be hard to read so often 1 mg/ml is written as 5mg/5ml. Divide 5 by 5 and you get 1.
Look, too for decimal points in doses. It is best to put a zero before a decimal point if no other number resides there so that decimal point will not be missed. 0.1 means one tenth. 0.01 means one one hundredth.
So, one person might be giving 0.3 ml of the 1 mg/ml concentration, but another might be giving 0.3 ml of the 5/mg/ml concentration. The second one is giving 5 times as much med as the first, or said a different way the first one is giving 1/5th of the med that the second one is giving.
That is also true for purchases. The same volume of 1 mg/ml med is going to cost less than the concentrations with more medication in them. Most people are not going to pay for mud slurries so this time imagine some quartz with gold flakes in it, the more gold in the volume of quartz, the more the specimen is going to cost. For some pretty visual aids to help that get across:
http://www.origsix.com/catalog2.asp?catid=35
Hey, whatever helps a concept take hold!
The gold in those is visible and not in a liquid but can see that some specimens are the same size as others but have less gold. That's the same with concentrations. The less concentrated the medication, the less gold -- opps, medication -- in the same size.
BTW, pills, capsules, and caplets also sometimes come with different concentrations available.
BTW, ours object least to the flavor of 1 mg/ml Prednisolone in a generic form we get at the A&P pharmacy, but there are other other meds for which we use compounding, and if a heavy concentration of Prednisolone must be given be use Belvidere in NJ.
The Compounding Pharmacies is a list of places which actually know ferrets and what is safe for them (for example, a pharmacy which does not know ferrets might use a stevia flavored compound -- information lacking in ferrets but some popular sites have unchecked warnings w dogs and there are studies indicating that it may drop blood glucose which is dangerous w insulinoma-- or a Xylitol based one -- fatal -- without knowing better because that pharmacy does not have the right veterinary background). The Compounding Pharmacies List can be found in:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/files/
This recent post has a lot of useful links on compounding including how to find an ACCREDITED compounding pharmacy because having taken an introduction to compounding is very different from having more intensively studied compounding:
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/FHL12859
I will copy this to the FHL because some people there might also find it useful.
Sukie (not a vet)
Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
all ferret topics:
http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html
"All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow."
(2010, Steve Crandall)
On change for its own sake: "You can go really fast if you just jump off the cliff."
(2010, Steve Crandall)
------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
ferrethealth-digest@yahoogroups.com
ferrethealth-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
ferrethealth-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/