Hey, all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. Go check out Real Life Pharmacology.com. Go subscribe there,

and you will get a free 31-page PDF on the top 200 drugs. A great little study guide, great

little refresher, whether you're a student or out in practice

as a physician, pharmacist, nurse, whatever healthcare profession you're in.

If you deal with medications, that resource is absolutely going to be helpful for you.

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real-life pharmacology.com. Let's get into the drug of the day today, and that is hydromorphone.

Brand name of this medication is dilated. And if you've been in health care at all, you'll probably know this is an opioid

analgesic. So primarily what we're going to use this for is treatment of pain. And more specifically,

ideally, we'd like to try to limit its use to acute pain. We're definitely trying to avoid chronic opioid use

if we can at all do it. So really acute pain is where you're going to see this out in clinical

practice most often. So being an opioid analgesic, it binds opioid receptor, which ultimately inhibits those pain signals to the brain and central nervous system.

The way I best explain it is it essentially alters the perception of pain or how you feel about the pain.

So, for example, sprained or broken ankle, something like that,

and we use an opioid, we're not going to really heal that area or reduce inflammation or do

anything like that. We're just going to essentially block or blunt those pain signals or reduce

those pain signals going from the site to the injury

to the brain. So hopefully that makes sense there for you. All right, one thing I wanted to mention

specifically with hydromorphone, and this is true of other opioids as well, but there are a lot of different dosage forms with hydromorphone.

So we've got injectable, we've got oral immediate release, oral extended release, liquid oral.

It's a positori.

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