taking your meds

GuanYin

Was just at a conference on drug delivery and one of the issues that came up is patients taking their medication on time.

Alot of the problems with drug delivery is that patients render their treatment ineffective by taking their medication at irregular timepoints, thus either having too much or two little drug in their system around doses.

For viral treatments, antibiotics and contraceptives the results can be disaterous, the pills effectiveness is generally reduced 15% in 12 hours. So there is suggestion that emphesis should be on forgiveness times between doses rather than ease of dosing or novel methods of delivery (such as patches or implants).

So just wondering about boards people, do you strictly adhere to medication, or do you tend to be lax not taking it at the same time every day?

sunbeam

Well from personal experience both myself and several other friends who take the contraceptive pill tended to be very particular about the time we took it at the beginning (I've watch people time it by the minute!:p ), but become less concerned over time.

From general conversation with friends who take it I've found that those who are doing so for primarily medical as opposed to contraceptive reasons (at any given time) tend to be a little more lax in their timing. This is just my totally unscientific opinion of course!

simu

Me, I try to be as exact as possible with medication. With antibiotics, generally you'd only be taking them for a week or so anyway so there's no time to get into the habit of forgetting! Sometimes though, I find the language used by doctors and on medication to be imprecise and subjective. For example, when they say "Take one pill two times daily", should that be every 12 hours exactly or just roughly i.e. one in the morning, the other in the evening or when they say for creams, "Apply a small amount evenly", what exactly does that mean? When I ask doctors questions like this they react as if I were a total hypochondriac for taking the whole thing so seriously, which is really annoying.

Any medicines I've ever taken were pretty easy to administer so yes, I think timing is the more important issue.

GuanYin

Originally posted by simu
Me, I try to be as exact as possible with medication. With antibiotics, generally you'd only be taking them for a week or so anyway so there's no time to get into the habit of forgetting!

I'm pretty much the same, but I know an awful lot of people who think they feel better on the last two days and decide not to take the antibiotics, they then say "ah but sure you're not supposed to take them if you aren't sick"....doh!!!!!

Apparently the stockpile of antibiotics in US households from post-911 is frightening.... they really need to get there act together regulating that sort of thing....

Originally posted by simu
Sometimes though, I find the language used by doctors and on medication to be imprecise and subjective. For example, when they say "Take one pill two times daily", should that be every 12 hours exactly or just roughly i.e. one in the morning, the other in the evening

Generally they leave it to your discretion but it would be one after getting up and the other a while before going to bed (unless you need to take with food etc). But as people's lifestyles vary (some people sleep for 4 hours, some sleep for 8) its just common sense.

Scary fact of the day number 1: Most people on medication for heart related disease die from their illness in the early hours of the morning. This is because the medication (which is usually take 4 times a day) is metabolised quickly and the earlier they go to bed the longer since their last dosage....

Originally posted by simu
or when they say for creams, "Apply a small amount evenly", what exactly does that mean? When I ask doctors questions like this they react as if I were a total hypochondriac for taking the whole thing so seriously, which is really annoying.

Hehe...its could be because when confronted with a girl asking their wondering if its appropriate to demonstrate...... maybe you just got em flustered....

Originally posted by simu
Any medicines I've ever taken were pretty easy to administer so yes, I think timing is the more important issue.

YEah, I guess thats what I am asking, is ease of administration more important than forgiveness time between doses....

Victor

I have actually been on the same medication, in varying doses, since last October (I've recently come off it). I recorded the taking of ever tablet, by number per day compared to prescription. Despite the tablets being in mornign and night type packs, I could never remember to take the tablets more than about 90% of the time (whether it was one or two tablets a day).

Then as I was reducing the dosage from 2 per day to one (and eventually none), for a few weeks I took two tablets one day (morning and midnight) and one the next (middle of day), balancing it out as best I could. While unothodox, this was done under supervision and the doasage was quite low (soemthing like 5% of recommended maximum).

I reached about 96% for those few weeks.

Victor

I kept a record of everything (not including the odd Disprin, etc.) I took in the last year - here are the 6 day averages.

GuanYin

Thats not actually that bad (bar one blip).

From a pharmacologists point of view your a pretty good patient.

You really want to keep it above 85-90% though.

Drug forgiveness time varies greatly (and I mean anything from 3-48 hours)