One of the things that has really been tripping me up so far this year has been my lack of knowledge of commonly used therapeutic drugs. I have a basic knowledge of the drugs which affect major body systems. For example, I know that drugs that end in "-prazole" such omeprazole, esomeprazole and macgroodleprazole are all proton pump inhibitors that you might use for people with bad reflux*. But what I don't know are the forty-eight other drugs that basically do the same thing, nor do I know their brand names or the dosages. So I've been spending a fair bit of time flipping through the Australian Medicines Handbook trying to figure out what the hell people are talking about.
It doesn't help my cause when I get drugs with superficially similar names confused with each other. Today I got dexamethasone mixed up with dexamphetamine, which turned out to be a great way to ask someone a bunch of really stupid questions. You know when people say, "There are no stupid questions"? They're lying.
The patient was an old guy on dexamethasone, which is a corticosteroid, to soothe his inflaméd liver. (See how I made it sound all mediæval there, by writing "inflaméd" instead of "inflamed"? It's the little touches like that that keep readers coming back. And yes, I have just figured out how to use the Windows character map. Why do you ask?) Anyway, I thought he was on dexamphetamine, which is what kids with ADHD go on so that their parents can steal it from them, drive all night to Surfers Paradise and crash their hire-car into the ocean. You can imagine the hilarious hi-jinks that ensued after my foolish mistake!
After that little episode, my GP pulled out a patient's drug chart listing about 20 different medication and told me to go through them and tell him what they were for. Apart from having to have the brand names translated, it turns out I actually knew what most of the drugs do and how they do it. My GP said, "Oh! Well, you actually know quite a lot!" in a very surprised tone. I would have gotten narky but I was just as surprised.
Oh, and I'd better mention sex and rock & roll before I'm done. There we go.
* But not aripiprazole, which is an antipsychotic, so there goes that whole theory. Bugger.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment