How Do You Know How Much Medication To Give A Dog?
Dosage is the branch of pharmacology responsible for studying the doses and amounts that a patient must receive to reach the therapeutic amount, minimizing side effects. In the case of veterinary medicine, when dealing with different animals of different sizes, this consideration is especially important.
Knowing the amount of medication to give a dog is essential for the proper treatment of any disease. Today, we’re going to talk about how to calculate the correct dose of medication for a dog.
Dosage of medications
Certainly, the last time your doctor prescribed some commonly used medication, he didn’t take your weight into account. This circumstance, in general, occurs frequently, as adult humans fall into more restricted size ranges and it is usually not necessary to calculate the weight accurately to administer the correct dose.
Meanwhile, in relation to dogs, veterinarians work with body size ranges ranging from a kilogram or less to 70 kilograms or more. Therefore, calculating the exact dose is vitally important to ensure the correct treatment, as a large dog can be 70 times the size of a small one.
How much medication should a dog be given?
Generally, most medications, with a few exceptions such as chemotherapy products that are based on body surface area, tend to depend on the dog’s total weight. Therefore, knowing the animal’s more or less exact weight is essential to guide any treatment.
Sometimes it can be easy to calculate the weight of an animal “with a good eye”. However, in dogs with long, voluminous fur, or animals that are very robust and muscular, these approximate calculations can be very different from the actual weight. Therefore, to protocol the clinical act, the dog must be weighed regularly.
Once the dog’s weight is known, we only need to know the dose that corresponds to that weight. The amount of medication is usually expressed on the package insert in mg/kg. If, for example, the total dose of a drug is 0.1 mg/kg and the animal weighs seven kilos, we should administer 0.7 mg. If, on the other hand, he weighs 65 kilos, he should take 6.5 mg of medicine.
How many times a day?
The amount of daily doses is also indicated on the package insert. It is generally indicated by the following abbreviations:
- SID or QD: From the Latin semel in die or quaque die which, for those who do not know this language, means once a day.
- BID: Bis in die , ie twice a day.
- TID: Ter in die, let’s see if you can guess how many times a day that means.
There are actually more indications, but most medications are administered SID or BID and at most TID.
How should medication be divided?
There is actually a simple answer to this question. Most animal drug manufacturers are aware of these particularities and, therefore, the veterinary medicine cabinet has many drugs in P, M and G versions.
This variety in pill size is a great advantage for administering the medication, as it is not enough to just calculate the quantity and dose, it is also necessary to administer the medication correctly. Having pills of different sizes to suit the needs of each animal greatly facilitates the clinical veterinarian’s job.
However, on some occasions, the necessary medicine does not have a veterinary version. Thus, following the so-called cascade prescription, it may be necessary to resort to human pharmacopoeia.
This is where the work gets complicated and you may find yourself needing to break a pill into 24 pieces for a two-pound dog. But anyway, with patience and a steady hand…
We hope these lines have helped you to understand a little better the way we veterinarians work to calculate and, above all, correctly dose medications for dogs.
