Use Of Mobile Health Applications in Understanding Pharmakonetics

You bought food from a street vendor and a few hours later, your stomach started grumbling and churning crazily. Moments after, the swirling feeling went down and the bubbling sensation seems to want to exit. You know you’re in for a trip to the bathroom for a couple of times but as soon as you drink that Loperamide you’re over it. You’re muscle is sore and aching from exercise and after you spread that Ibuprofen gel in the area you suddenly felt relief. Or you’re about to get your tooth extracted but before any pulling is executed, your dentist made you inhale nitrous oxide to numb the senses around your mouth.

Have you ever wondered how drugs perform their magic inside your body that effects the changes that work for your advantage, or at least that’s how they were made in the first place? Pharmacokinetics, as succinctly as one can define it, is what the body does to the drug. It is the drug’s fate after it has entered your mouth and through your esophagus into your stomach until it reaches its desired locations and out from your body. This information are commonly disclosed in drug leaflets and drug handbooks which can now be efficiently accessed in mobile health applications such as the Epocrates Essentials Deluxe; offering you an extensive amount of drug information on prescription and non-prescription medications.

In order for a drug to initiate a response or produce an effect, a drug must be created in a manner that allows it to survive the barriers it needs to traverse in once inside the human body. This is primarily the reason why a drug is formulated into its proper form so scrupulously so that it achieves its optimum efficiency delivering maximum efficacy against a pathologic condition of the body.

When the drug reaches the body, it must break down and dissociate in a timely manner so the body’s cells can absorb it within. Absorption is the drug’s journey to the bloodstream. This is a rate-limiting step when it comes to tablets because a lot of factors can alter the drug’s absorption. This is an exemption with oral liquid medications, lozenges and parenterals (injectables) because the first one mentioned is devoid of dissociation process and is immediately absorbed by the body; while the lozenges are allowed to be absorbed by the capillaries inside the mouth. Moreover, parenterals are injected straight to the veins or in the fat tissues at times and achieve a hundred percent absorption instantly.

Once in the bloodstream the drug is disseminated to the target organs where it’s supposed to elicit and effect. This process is called distribution. After binding to precise locations and when action is initiated the drug unbinds and undergoes metabolism by hepatic enzymes. This is a critical step especially for those with renal malfunctions because inadequate metabolism of a drug might lead to accumulation resulting to toxicity. When the drug fails to be altered to a metabolite in a form that encourages elimination, the drug remains in the body longer than needed.

These are processes that patients have to get an idea of even without mastering it because these are physiologic processes that actually take place inside them. Various factors affect the proper execution of each step, like food, organ dysfunction, and proper administration of the drug. Extended-release tablets for instance are not supposed to be chewed as they are designed to release their contents at a predestined time; dairy products are not to be given concurrently with tetracycline as it decreases the drug’s absorption. These are just some of the very relevant information incorporated in mobile health applications.