Re: pill intake

Re: pill intake   (11/19/2016, 3:27 PM)

I saw this question by accident. And as a physician I can tell you it is meaningless and has absolutely no sense at all.

First the expression pills does not mean ANYTHING if you don't include what pills or better WHICH active ingredient (A.I.) it's in your pill.

Let us suppose (just as an example) that the A.I. in the pill is paracetamol (a most widely non prescription available pain killer).

And let us make another simplification. Namely, that the A.I. does not break down in the G.I. tract into another substance(s).

(I'm no pharmacologist, so I did not look up if paracetamol enters the bloodstream unchanged, but I think that it does - many other substances originally found in the pill have first to transform into an A.I., which is able to enter into the bloodstream).

ONLY then it makes sense, to measure the concentration in the blood of it (this can be done in a vein, that is much more accessible, for example in the forearm or the back side of your palm, that the vein you are talking about, namely the iliac vein - look up on the net, where it is).

And I'm talking about CONCENTRATION not COUNT as you did.

When talking about concentration, it is usually* meant the weight of the substance (in grams, milligrams, nanograms - as you were talking about) divided by unit for volume (for example: millilitres);

* here I'm talking about MASS concentration, but this is not the ONLY one defined;

Example: 80 mg/dl (decilitre) of alcohol in the blood or bloodstream is the legal limit for intoxication in some countries;

COUNT is something completely different and is expressed with a plain number, divided with volume of blood (usually cubic millimetres - cmm). And so you get results, that are usually in the range of:

1.White Blood Cells (WBC): 4300 to 10800 per cmm; 2.RBC: 4,2 - 5,9 million cells per cmm; 3. Platelets: 150000 - 400000 per cmm;

EVERYTHING I wrote is a big SIMPLIFICATION, but I hope, you got the MAIN messages:

A) Whatever pill you may be talking about, does not even reach the bloodstream at all (and is not meant to. EVER!). The bloodstream enters the A.I., which is (under normal circumstances) the main part of any pill;

B) 640 ng/dl is a measurement for concentration, not COUNT (most likely you probably heard the expression CBC - Complete Blood Count, which includes, but is not limited to the values I described under 1, 2 and 3.

Though I was LONG, REPETITIVE and probaly not completely correct (as for example definitions are) you need to get in order your fundamental understandings. Others probably did not answer, because they thought, you are not serious. And to be honest:

Now even I'm not so sure as I was, when I started to write the post.