[Skipbidder]

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Hey. anyone familiar with this stuff?

a pill called: hyrdrocodone Tab 7.5-500

how many would a physician / pharmacist recommend taking in a day?

would 10 per day be more than the recommended usage? normal? seems like a lot to me.

i'm just being nosy with a friend of mine wondering if he's an addict [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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I'd like to stress that it is not likely to be the hydrocodone component that is the short-term problem for your friend. It is the acetaminophen part. It is extremely unlikely that a doctor recommended that your addict friend take 10 of these daily. If I wrote for 10 vicodins daily, I'm positive I'd get a call from a pharmacist. 10 pills a day gets him to 5 grams of acetaminophen. Maximum recommended daily dose is 4 grams for someone with a healthy liver. For some drugs, the maximum recommended dosage is pretty meaningless. Not for tylenol, however. You can blow your liver up pretty easily. If he's a career drinker with bad liver disease, he might not want to max out at any more than 1000 mg (two vicodins) daily, if that. My inpatient hospital formulary uses Norcos rather than Vicodins. Their acetaminophen content is 325 mg rather than 500, so a healthy person can take 12 daily instead of just 8. There is actually no ceiling dose of the opioid component. I had one cancer patient over 2 grams of morphine (a stronger opioid) daily. That is enough to kill almost anyone reading this message. Your body can get used to escalating doses of opioids, however. Hobbes probably gives about 2 mg IV morphine as his first dose for his average ER patients he decides to give opioids to.

As far as addiction potential, it is commonly accepted that those people who are in bad pain have a much lower potential to get addicted. However, I haven't seen any good study data to back this up. It might just be "common knowledge" that happens to be wrong. Addiction potential is usually very low on my list, as I am frequently dealing with end-of-life cases. If you've got two months to live because of your metastatic lung cancer, then who the hell cares if you get addicted to morphine?

If you are worried about overdose rather than addiction, then you should look for sedation and respiratory depression.