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

I want to remind you guys, you can certainly subscribe to the email list at real life

pharmacology.com, where I give away a free 31-page PDF on the top 200 drugs. In that PDF, I note some of the most important clinical pearls you'll need to know

in clinical practice as well as some of those things that come up on various board exams and

pharmacology classes and so on and so forth. So really kind of a unique resource for any, you know,

nurse, pharmacist, pharmacy student, med student, anybody taking

pharmacology classes or dealing with medications on a day-to-day basis. So go check that out at

real-life pharmacology.com. Today I want to get into nicotine patches.

So this medication is obviously to replace nicotine and help patients stop smoking.

Brand name of nicotine patches, Nicoderm CQ is the one that I've seen used most commonly.

With nicotine patches, I think it is important to note that we do have three primary dosage strengths.

So we've got a 7 milligram patch, a 14 milligram patch, and a 21 milligram patch.

And really, there is a lower end weight restriction, but for most adult patients, they're above that. So if somebody's super low weight,

you might want to double check and look that up. But by and large, we look at the number of

cigarettes smoked per day and judge our initial dosing off of that

in most cases. So obviously there could be a situation clinically where maybe a patient has tried

patches in the past and they didn't tolerate the high dose or something, you might

start at a lower dose in that type of situation.

But going off of the cigarette smoked per day, if we've got a patient that is smoking 11 or more,

we're going to generally go with the 21 milligram patch and start with that.

So that's the highest dose there.

If it's 10 or less, then we might start with 14 milligrams as far as the patch goes there.

...