Health Advice: Scale Your Child’s Way to Successful Treatment

What makes treatment successful? Proper diagnosis, appropriate and accurate dosage of selected medication and patient taking it as directed will provide the successful medical outcome.

Let’s focus on one of the above component to successful treatment: accurate dosage.

Your child’s weight is important to determine the appropriate dosage. I will elaborate this further. In my practice, I have often received children’s prescriptions that doctors have written that can over-dose or under-dose due to improper weight given or estimated. Infants and children belong to a special group of patients that is most often their dosage is determined by weight. If weight is not accurate then the treatment will be either ineffective if weight is underestimated or worst unsafe if the weight is overestimated.
When I receive a child’s prescription, the most important information I have to gather is their weight. However, many parent do not have the child’s current weight. I will either offer my pharmacy’s scale to have the parent weigh their child or have them weigh at home. Then with this important piece of information, I will determine if the dosage is appropriate for the child’s weight.

For example, at my practice, Biaxin (clarithromycin) is a commonly prescribed antibiotic for chest and ear infection for children. The appropriate dosage for Biaxin is 15mg/kg/day in 2 divided doses. If the child weighs 20 kg (or 44 lbs), then the most appropriate dosage is 300mg per day or 150mg twice daily. But, if the doctor or parent underestimated or overestimated the weight of the child, resulting to ineffective treatment of the infection that may lead to bacterial resistance or overdose the child and lead to more undesirable effects such as upset stomach.

If you are a parent, do you have a scale at home?

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