dosage

Now here is a sad story...
I have a slip of paper that I used to work out the dosage (concentration) of Codeine in generic Tylenol #3 for kids. The reason I did this is because when my daughter broke her arm, I went to the pharmacy and got the prescribed pain medication for her and dosed her. However, it became very clear that the pharmacy solution was not controlling her pain. We were all hazy, sleep deprived and worried, and so it took a little while to understand that there wasn't enough acetaminophen in her Tylenol. I didn't want to overdose her, because acetaminophen can easily be fatal if you double up doses. Neither did I want to OD her on the codeine part, even though I have a suspicion that she is resistant to opioids (as is her father and his mother). How does one test this, anyway, except by horrible trial and error. So I finally had the sense to google the dose concentration to figure out how much she was getting.

There was 120mg of acetaminophen and 12mg of codeine per 5 mL dose, and she was only allowed one dose per six hours. Well...120 is well below the recommended dose for regular tylenol. So no wonder she was getting no pain relief. Especially if she couldn't get help from the codeine. I switched her to plain tylenol and got much better pain control.
So that left this nice bottle of #3, if I could figure out how to use it. I calculated that an adult could take a 15mL dose up to six times a day (every four hours) with no toxic effect. So we saved it for possible future use.

So trust your gut, but do the math to confirm.