Why is this relevant to pharmacy, you ask? Well, there are a few reasons.
Firstly, millimoles are the most common way to express concentration of electrolytes. If you are mixing TPN for a patient, you will need to be able to use these calculations to determine appropriate quantities of additives.
Pharmacy students really seem to struggle with mole calculations. Here are the two most common errors:
Also, drugs are often formulated in their salt form (usually to improve their solubility). A problem occurs when multiple salt forms (or even just a salt form and the pure drug base) are available for use, as the amount of base drug in each salt form will differ.
For example, in Australia, morphine is available in three salt forms:
We may need to calculate dose-equivalence between salt forms based on the amount of pure drug…
Usually, drugs are scheduled (classified according to their relative safety) according to content of pure drug (also known as "drug base") .
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