Hey all, Eric Christensen here from real-life pharmacology. I am your host and pharmacist.

I try to provide you guys some real-life clinical practice pearls, which also can definitely help you throughout your pharmacology courses in school, as well as just out in practice as you become a physician, a pharmacist, nurse practitioner,

a nurse, just trying to ultimately help our patients be safe with appropriate medication use.

So today we're going to cover fentanyl pharmacology.

And fentanyl is a mu-oponist. So it basically desensitizes the central

nervous system to pain signals. Remember that opioids in general, they do not alter the sight of the

pain in any way, shape, or form. So if you sprain your ankle or you have a

surgery or something like that and you take an opioid, it's not going to alter. It's not going

to help at that location, but it will help kind of block the pain signals from that

location to the central nervous system. So that's kind of how in general opioid drugs work mechanistically.

With their side effect profile, it is very significant.

And as I'm sure you've seen throughout the news,

we're having all sorts of trouble with the opioid crisis

and the risk of addiction and abuse and dependence and tolerance

and things of that nature.

So that is high on the priority list when I want you guys to think about opioids.

And that risk, particularly with opioid overdose, is respiratory depression. So drugs work on the

respiratory tract and they shut down breathing is essentially

what they do. And that's how people end up going to the emergency room or end up dying as well.

So big risk there with fentanyl. I do want to mention specifically you will hear fentanyl used as a street drug.

And I did go to a conference. It was a great conference with DEA folks. So these are folks in

charge of the enforcement of, you know, drug laws and controlled substances and things like that. And they

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