Why Do Nurses Use Prescriptions?

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Every day doctors and nurses use math to provide good health care for patients around the world. They use it when they are writing prescriptions or to administer medication. Professionals use math while drawing statistical graphs for success rates of treatments. Numbers provide plenty of information for professionals in the medical field. “It is reassuring for the general public to know that our doctors and nurses have been properly trained by studying mathematics and its uses for medicine.” ("Medicine and Math - Math Central.") Doctors regularly write prescriptions to patients with many different conditions. Prescriptions show the dosage amount for a specific medication. Most prescriptions for medications have guidelines for dosage amounts in milligrams per kilograms. Doctors or nurses need to figure out how many milligrams of medicine the patient will need depending on height and weight. If the weight of the patient is only known in pounds, the doctor needs to convert the measurement to kilograms then find the amount of milligrams for the prescription. There is a large difference between milligrams/kilograms and milligrams/pounds so it is important …show more content…
That will determine how often the patient will need to take their medicine in order to keep a good amount in their body. If a patient takes a pill with 50mg of a particular medicine in the morning, the next day 40% of the medication has been washed out of their body. This means that 30% of the medication stayed in the patients body and 20% got washed out. If the patient continues to take their 50mg pill each morning, on the morning of day two the patients still has the first 30% left over in their body plus the new 50mg that they just took. They now have 80mg in their body. The doctor needs to determine how much and how often the patient needs to take their medicine for it to work properly without the fear of them