On Tuesday, Mar 22, 2005, at 15:34 America/Chicago, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
When I adjust coumadin doses I normal have to use whole or half pills
of the medicien the patient already has.
Fer Instance, if a pt takes 5mg of coumadin a day, that's 35mg of coumadin week
and suppose I do a test that says thye are not taking enough coumadin
and to increase the dose by 10%, ie add another 3.5mg but have it
split evenly over the week or at least every other day.
normall, I would say ok
Take 5mg coumadine everty but on mon and thurs day take 7.5mg
(Note the patient only has 5mg tabs, which they can split to make dose
adjust my 2.5)
My question is, How would I solve this using math instead of geustimating it. What kind of math am I talking about here?
I don't know that much about this medication (and I know you just said that the patient only has 5 mg pills) but on this page,
http://www.heartpoint.com/coumadin.html
I see that doses come in amounts like 1, 2, 2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10.
With the ability to split pills, you can add 0.5, 1.25 and 3.75 to the list of possibilities.
And then I wonder if the "math topic" expands from integer math, as has been suggested, to combinatorics which can tell you what combinations of pills and half pills that are at your disposal for making dosages. There are other factors, however, like keeping the prescription simple for patients. For example, let's say that the patient is not going to want to buy more than 2 pill sizes. This will give 4 different dosage amounts that one could play with.
Let's say that the patient should never have to take more than 2 pills (or pill pieces) each day. The possible dosages that can be prescribed for a given day would be all the pair-wise combinations of the dosages. These could be obtained with 2 FOR loops:
### >>> dosages = [1, 2, 3] #just an example; different from above notes >>> possible = [] >>> for i,x in enumerate(dosages): .. for y in dosages[i:]: .. possible.append((x+y,[x,y])) .. >>> for pi in possible: .. print pi .. (2, [1, 1]) (3, [1, 2]) (4, [1, 3]) (4, [2, 2]) (5, [2, 3]) (6, [3, 3]) >>> ###
Just a thought, /c
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