Many drugs used in current anesthetic practice are administered
intravenously. An appreciation of their kinetics and dynamics is of
great assistance in determining the most appropriate drug to use, and
optimal dosage regimens for any given patient.
This book is specially oriented to the requirements of
anesthesiologists. It will enable the student of those subjects to gain
enough knowledge to make these subjects usable in daily anesthetic
practice. As such it is intermediate in difficulty between
mathematically oriented texts, and those which only offer a very
qualitative understanding of these subjects. Practical applications and
examples of the uses to which kinetic and dynamic principles can be put
in daily practice are emphasized and illustrated. Basic principles and
techniques with which the reader can perform kinetic and dynamic
calculations are explained simply and demonstrated in detail using
examples derived from clinical practice. Two appendices provide kinetic
and dynamic data on the most commonly used anesthetic drugs.
The last chapters use the principles discussed in the first chapters to
show how variations of normal physiology and disease affect drug
kinetics and dynamics. This is especially valuable to the clinician as
it enables clinically useful, albeit qualitative, predictions to be made
of the direction of any change of kinetic and dynamic parameters of
drugs due to these factors.