SHOULD YOU BE TAKING HIS MEDICINE?

This morning on CBS - Dr. Larry Kato (Spelling?) announced that studies confirmed women need half the dosage of the sleeping medicine Ambien than that men are prescribed. Women's blood levels were  about 45 percent higher than is safe for them to drive several hours after taking the medicine.

Dr Kato said this discovery has far reaching implications. It means men and women do not metabolize medicines in the same ways. Pharmaceutical companies will need to do studies on each of the genders to determine what patients need. It is not yet known if all drugs will require different amounts for men and for women, but this cannot be accurately determined until there is more research for each medicine.

Interestingly, in the 1990's some Doctors were making the point about different dosages needed for each sex, and raised questions about studies that included only male subjects, or male animals. Some studies were adjusted to include both male and female subjects, but even still the dosages were based on the average, rather than on each of the genders researched separately.

Dr. Kato said this means that the actual metabolization processes on even a cellular level is most likely,  vastly different, between males and females.

A side point to this is that when you are discarding medicines, they should not be flushed down the toilet. Ultimately these chemicals get into the water supply, and many of us get small quantities of drugs that are not healthy for us to ingest. I am not sure if pharmacies take drug discards for safe disposal.

© by Ruth Zachary.