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Essentials of Materia Medica, Therapeutics, and Prescription Writing
Essentials of Materia Medica Therapeutics and Prescription Writing Author:Henry Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INFLUENCES THAT MODIFY EFFECTS OF MEDICINES. 31 as a rule, they bear larger proportionate doses of purgatives. No scheme for calculating the doses from the ag... more »e of the patient alone can be relied on in practice. What is Dr. Young's rule for calculating the dose for children? Convert the child's age into a fraction by using the age itself as a numerator and the age + 12 as a denominator, the result being the proportion of the adult dose which should be administered to the child. Thus, at three years —— =- =- of that of the adult. At 3+12 15 5 21 years of age the full dose is given. What is Dr. Cowling's rule ? Dr. Cowling proposed to divide the patient's next birthday by 24 ; thus, at three years the dose would be — =— of that of the adult How may the dose for a child be more easily calculated in the metric system ? Dr. Lauder Brunton proposes to multiply the next birthday by 4 and divide the result by 100 ; or, what is the same thing, to multiply the full dose by the child's next birthday, then by 4, and remove the decimal point two places to the left. Thus, if the dose for an adult be 1. Gm., that for a child of 3 years will be 1X4X4 = .160 Gins. I. t)t) How do sex, idiosyncrasy, constitution and habits influence medicinal effects ? Men generally bear larger doses of medicines than women. Many persons manifest idiosyncrasies with respect to certain drugs; thus, some are very susceptible to the poisonous effects of even minute doses of arsenic; others cannot take quinine or opium or belladonna or the iodides, and in others very dilute solutions of cocaine applied to the mucous membranes may cause alarming symptoms. As a rule, the larger and more robust the individual, the less easily is he influenced by drugs. When a medicine is habitually ...« less