From: Fred Lindberg
Date: March 21 1999 5:35pm
Subject: Re: design question
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On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:27:05 -0500, Ayman Haidar wrote:

>I would like to design a table for medicines, as you know they come in
>different dosages and different frequency. I was woindering what is the
>best way to create the table, I was thinking like this;

It depends if you later want to store other info and if you want to be
able to search dosages:

For a "active substance" there are several brands (cimetidine is the US
as "cimetidine", "tagamet", etc). In that case, you may want to have a
table for "active substances" and one for trade names pointing to it.
Price differs between brands and sometimes dosage may differ as well
(e.g. brand 1 can be given 800 mg x 1 or 400 mg x 2, but brand2 hasn't
been tested at 800 mg x 1 and is recommented only at 400 mg x 2). 

If dosage is for a patient, it's better to store it with the patient
info. If it is generic dosage recommendations, they differ with
indication (e.g. 400 mg twice a day for ulcer, 800 mg at night for
heart burn, and 10 mg/kg divided into 2 doses per day for children). It
may also be a range. For some medicines, duration is important and
there are complicated examples (100 mg daily for 1 week, then skip 3
weeks; repeat cycle 3 times).

It's worth thinking a lot when designing and knowing exactly what you
want to use the database for.




-Sincerely, Fred

(Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)