Reminder to self - smoking cessation and anticoag.

Pharmacists are essential in terms of patient counselling supported by their heavy pharmaceutical product knowledge (second to none hor)

Smoking cessation (you may want to refer to this godly paper or the MOH guidelines):

Smokers smoke because of
- Nicotine addiction
- Habit
- Emotion

Give patients a brief overrall view of the products available to allow them to chose which they think will suit them better (no one knows better about the patient than the patient themselves) so as to increase patient compliance

You can play around with the different dosage forms to reach the nicotine replacement level if the patient is indeed addicted to nicotine.
- Try to make up the patient's total nicotine intake then step down

Agaration of the amount of nicotine
- Lite - 0.5mg /stick
- Normal - 1mg /stick
- Malaysian Normal - 1.5mg /stick
All as written on ciggie box

The 16hours patch (15mg, 10mg, 5mg) gives lesser side effects than the 24 hours patch (21mg, 14mg, 7mg)

The 10 mg inhaler has a very low BV (approx 30-40%)

The 2mg gum has only a BV of 50%


Warfarin (you may want to refer to the Pharmacy Guidelines or the British Guidelines)

All restructured hospitals only stock 1 brand - Marevan and the colour is pretty important to differentiate them and to test for patient compliance:
5mg - Pink
3mg - Blue
1 mg - Brown

Vitamin K comes in a while for for reconstitution as infusion. When giving patient oral Vitamin K treatment, remember to draw out required amounts to dilute - if you give a few ml, the chances of patients getting a complete dose as possible may be non-existent.

Vit K works pretty fast to lower INR, so you may want to do an INR check the very next day.