Pharmacokinetics Project I

A Suggested Algebra Investigation

Algebra Student Meets Pharmacist

Your first step is to select a medicine such as Aspirin or any doctor's prescription and ask your pharmacist about the medicine's half-life. Ask for the reference page distributed by the drug company that made the medicine. Write a few sentences in the form of a paragraph about your selection of medicine and talk with the pharmacist.

You may need to talk to a relative or friend to learn about the clinical conditions under which your selected medicine is used including the prescription timing if this medicine is not one that you take. Write another paragraph about the prescription and how one feels the medicine changes physical or mind-body characteristics over time.

Algebra Student Meets The Merck Manual

An on line web version of The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy that covers information related to this pharmacokinetics project will provide background material that you should write about under the topic of Pharmacokinetics Of XXXXXXX Medicine for your third paragraph. The company information sheet provides the data you may exemplify in the general Merck concepts. How much you write depends on your interest but do include half-life bioavailability of your medicine.

Algebra Student Graphs Plasma Concentration VRS Time

Your graph is much more accurate than our Merck example since you have the numbers needed to fill in details. Our Merck example will give you names for parts of the graph that are relevant to the application you make for your selected medicine.

Your graph should show how the prescription changes the plasma concentration over at least four doses. Another algebra class investigated one modeling of a several dose prescription and has some results that may help you see the logic-algebra or algebra relationships needed to formulate a drug plasma concentration vrs time curve.

Algebra Student Gives Credit

List the pharmacist's name, title, drug store name and phone number.
List the sources you used just as you would if this written work was done for an English or history class.
Include the name of the medicine and the company name.
List exact information location (URL pages) that you used from the web.

Thanks to algebra students Michael Ade, Colette Beisner, Eric Berman, Bradley Bosso, Melissa Cates, Susan Donze, Anthony Effinger, Jessica Elmore, Todd Hudgins, Elizabeth Ide, Christopher Jackson, Michael Kersten, Francesca Licavoli, Steve Ortbals, Julie Pritchard, Katherine Ryan, David Sargeant, Colleen Schnittker, David Sossiachvili, Zachary Vavra, Ivo Vukomanovic, and Melissa White for projects that inspired this web page.

You may enjoy this math project so check with your teacher to see if it is a reasonable addition to your course.