Half-Life

 The primary objective of this Pari talks blogspot.com is to draw out a smile from serious minded science lovers, and no foul language is used.

L'objectif principal de ce blog Pari Talks blodpsot.com est de tirer un sourire des amateus de science serie'ux, acun langage grossier n'est utilise'.

Half-Life.

PKGhatak, MD

No.16.

A video gamer will recognize the word 'Half-Life' instantly. The video game he is playing has an accompanying soundtrack provided by the famous Kelly Bailey, who established the Half-Life line of music.

 Here, we are going to a different tract.

Ernest Rutherford, while studying radioactive materials, discovered that the radioactivity of radium decays over a given time. He called the time taken for the decay of half of the material the Half-Life. Later, this concept was adopted by the Pharmaceutical industry.

Suppose your doctor hands you a prescription for your cold and fever, which lasted for 5 days. You look at it before handing it over to the pharmacist. You may find that he prescribed you three medications; one to be taken every 8 hours, another one just once at bedtime, and the third one twice a day. Why did he do so:   to keep you home and set your clock so that you do not miss taking meds according to the instructions, or is there a scientific reason behind it. The answer is - each drug has a different Half-Life.

After a drug is administered, it is distributed all over the body. Some drugs are spread over a wider pool, others are distributed over some limited areas based on many variables, one of the important factors is the solubility of the drug. The other factor is how the drug is eliminated from the body. When the amount eliminated is matched with the amount taken, that stage is most desirable in therapeutics. To reach that goal, the clinicians depend on the stated Half-Life of the drug provided by the manufacturer. The steady-state is achieved after 5 Half-Lives. The dosing interval of drugs generally follows 1 Half-Life.

In some serious life-threatening bacterial infections, the Bacteriology lab provides the clinicians with the minimal therapeutic concentration of antibiotics. It is the clinician's responsibility to find out if that level is achieved or not; if not achieved, that might be the steady-state yet to be reached, or the Half-Life of the drug was overlooked, or the individual dosage was not calculated by the patient's body weight and height.

None of us wants to live a Half-Life in any form, shape, or number, but that's what a practitioner faces every Half-Life moment in his/her normal life.

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