Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics

One of the interesting things about anesthesia is that it challenges us to use our knowledge from undergrad and the first two years of medical school. While many physicians lament that the pre-medical and pre-clinical curricula have little to do with practical medicine, this is not the case in anesthesia. We have to have some understanding of competitive antagonists from biochemistry, signal transduction pathways from cellular biology, and even Poiseuille's law from physics. Textbook diagrams include calculus. The graphs shown above demonstrate basic pharmacologic principles that we all learn in the first year of medical school and promptly forget, at least until we start anesthesia residency. It's really interesting because I'm using far more basic science principles, theories, and ideas than I did last year doing internal medicine. Even though a knowledge of physiology is central to almost any specialty, anesthesia is really applied physiology. We think through problems with a mathematical, biologic, or chemical framework on a daily basis. Thus, studying for me means returning to those things I've learned in the last ten years.

First image shown under GNU Free Documentation License. Second image is in the public domain. Both are from Wikipedia.