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Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
…but also it’s not really helpful to me in patient care. I tend to find height and weight used separately more useful for patient care than the BMI and even then I don’t use them for much. The only time I really see a BMI that my brain does anything with is when it’s 40+ and at that point they’re almost certainly 300lb+ regardless of height and at that point the weight is still the most important piece of info I’m getting out of that section of the chart.
The caveat is that I’m not really doing too much with metabolism other than with my catatonia patients, and with them it’s much more about keeping weight on than anything else. You actually very rarely see an acute eating disorder in inpatient psychiatry (if it’s worth hospitalizing them, they need to be on a cardiac monitor and have somebody nearby who actually knows what’s in the crash cart).
Most of what I’m using the height and weight for is actually clothing / equipment sizes so I can have everything prepped for a new admission, and estimating how much literal weight is gonna get thrown around if they show up ready to fight. It’s also helpful to know if medical is dumping another supermorbidly obese patient on us (they almost have to have psych issues to get that big, but they also almost always need mobility aids we don’t have).
Aviandelight@mander.xyz 1 day ago
For the newly bred and nearly dead dosing is heavily dependent on rate of metabolism. This is why kidney and liver function are so important to dosage. If a person can’t metabolize and clear out metabolites at a steady rate then it increases the bioavailability of a drug in the person’s system and can lead to overdoses. I used to tell my lab students that there’s no guaranteed way to tell how young kids are going to react to a medication just because their little systems are doing so much at wildly different rates.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Oh I know why, but how the specific dosages (like, actual numbers) are actually chosen sounds like more of an art than a science.
Aviandelight@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Yea the science is making the dosage ranges and the art is the caregivers administering the medicine and monitoring the patient. I like the science part but the art part is too stressful for me.