Help with dosage calculations

Nursing Students Student Assist

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If a doctor orders 150 mg of amoxicillin once a day and you have 125 on hand how many mg will you give per dose? Thanks

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Sorry 125 mg

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Ordered/have =150/125 = 1.2mg

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Specializes in Acute Care, Rehab, Palliative.

If the order is for 150mg once a day then the dose will be 150mg.

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Specializes in Oncology.

Desire over Have --

You desire 150mg

You have 125mg/tab

150/125 = 1.2 tabs

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1.2 of the 125mg dose to get 150. you need to know the formula which is dose divided by drug on hand=volume

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Specializes in Acute Care, Rehab, Palliative.

But the question she asked was how many mg per dose not how many tabs.

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Specializes in Neuro Intensive Care.

You would give 150mg per dose.... As ordered.

With that being said, this problem needs more info for it to be valid. What form is the medicine in? Tablets? Liquid?

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Specializes in Pedi.
Sorry 125 mg

125 mg WHAT? 125 mg tabs? Oral suspension 125 mg/5 mL?

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There are a lot of calculated answers given here...and they are all wrong, because the question doesn't give you enough information to do any calculation at all. Actually, Loriangel and CNorman are the only ones to give the correct answer. If the dose is to be 150 mg, then the number of mg in the dose is...150 mg.

If you have 125 mg and you want 150 mg ... well, so what? Is that 125 mg in one tablet, in 5 cc, in a 250cc minibag, in a carload, what?

See, that's why I hate dependency on formulas when you don't understand the question. You can start dividing 150 by 125 or do all sorts of other things with those two numbers, but none of those will give you the answer. If your dose desired is 150 mg, your answer cannot be 1.2 mg.. or 1.2 anything.

So, OP, what was the question after all?

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We need more info!! if the doc orders 150mg and all you have on hand is 125mg then you need to go find 25mg somewhere because that's what he ordered.

No some people have mentioned 1.2 tabs and that would be correct if the question had mentioned that the 125mg on hand were tabs but it didn't. So it's either a trick question or we are missing info to the "on hand" part.

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There WILL be questions like this in your pharm class, precisely for this reason: to see if you just wanta jump right in and use a formula, when all you really need to do is read the question. You can see why the inclination to stop and read the question would be a safer way to practice in a real med room...

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