Today’s pharmacology lecture further cemented the wisdom of my decision to not go to pharmacy school. If we had today’s lecture and I realized that it would be the crux of my professional life, every day, until I retired – well, I might have needed to lock myself in a bathroom and cry.
But then I read the short version from a review book and realized all the concepts were actually straight-forward. And listen, while I understand the principle behind having world-class PhDs giving us basic science lectures – it does irritate me when I hear a lecture that I think could’ve been better delivered by a 2nd year medical student. This is how I see it going down:
PhD: “If you look to the log transformation, you can see the case where C0 is extrapolated from the elimination phase and can therefore use logarithmic relations to determine the value of k or t1/2, which follows nicely from our previous discussion of the relation between Vd and Css. Naturally we can assume that ln C0 will equal the ln of 5 minus 3k.”
MS2: “So this is the same exact graph we saw on the last slide, just log transformed to fit. Nothing’s different. Here we can assume that if we draw a straight line back from the straight line portion of the curve, we can probably end up with a reasonable estimation of what C0 was. Now there are 5 equations we can use to figure out the other variables – and here they are, listed on this lovely slide. You didn’t get here by not knowing how to do rearrange and plug’n chug basic algebra, so my job here is done. See you tomorrow.”
It’s exhausting trying to mentally translate the 1st version to the 2nd version. I think the people who stayed home and studied this one on their own were a step ahead of the rest of us on this one.
Action Potential 
if you prescribe a drug and the patient actually fills it and takes it, the rate at which it is absorbed will depend on the drug, and the state of the gi, hepatic, and renal systems, which influences the coded latin instructions for how often the drug should be taken.