Richard Snyder

The first step to dealing with high blood pressure is understanding your blood pressure measurement — those over and under numbers. When you know what your blood pressure is, you need to know what to do next. The good news is, you may be able to prevent high blood pressure or reduce your blood pressure by making some lifestyle changes.

No matter what initials you have after your name (RN, CNA, PA, and so on), you can bet you’ll see math on a daily basis if you’re going into (or are already in) a career in the medical field.Grasping some medical math basics — such as how to break down medical dosage problems into steps and use conversion factors — can simplify everyday situations all health care professionals face.

When you're preparing to take the PANCE or PANRE, you may feel like you have to know an endless amount of information. How will you ever remember all the details of so many diseases and conditions? Here, you can review some useful mnemonics that will not only help your recall as you prepare for your physician assistant exam but also improve your clinical acumen.

Treating adrenal fatigue includes improving nutrition, replacing key nutrients, supplementing with antioxidants, reducing stress, and beginning a controlled exercise program. Before you can treat the condition, though, you need to recognize the symptoms that suggest you have adrenal fatigue.Recognizing the symptoms of adrenal fatigueIt’s hard to recognize the symptoms of adrenal fatigue for what they are.

As a healthcare professional, you have to convert patient weights, fluid volumes, medication weights, and more. Conversion math isn’t hard to do as long as you know the basic conversion factors. Here are the most useful ones: Converting lb to kg and kg to lb lb = kg × 2.2 kg = lb ÷ 2.2 Converting mL to L a

Various conditions affect the ability of the eye to move as it should. For the Physician Assistant Exam, you will need to know about conditions such as strabismus and nystagmus. Point the eye in the right direction Strabismus is a disorder of the muscles of the eyes, preventing both eyes from focusing on the same object at the same time.

Cardiovascular doesn’t refer to just the heart; it also refers to the blood vessels. Guess what! For the Physician Assistant Exam (PANCE), you have to worry about the arteries and veins as well as the heart. The aorta One scenario you never want to miss is the person with a history of uncontrolled hypertension who presents to the emergency room with acute chest pain radiating to the back or with acute abdominal pain radiating to the back.

Whenever you’re administering intravenous (IV) infusions, you need to know the flow rate, infusion time, and total volume. Fortunately, calculating any one of these three variables is easy to do when you know the other two variables. Use the following equations: flow rate (mL/hr) = total volume (mL) ÷ infusion time (hr) infusion time (hr) = total volume (mL) ÷ flow rate (mL/hr) total volume (mL) = flow rate (mL/hr) × infusion time (hr) For example, if you must administer 1 L (1,000 mL) of fluid over 4 hours, use the first formula to calculate the flow rate, like so: flow rate (mL/hr) = total volume (mL) ÷ infusion time (hr) flow rate (mL/hr) = 1,000 ÷ 4 flow rate (mL/hr) = 250 The flow rate is 250 mL/hr.

Making sure that you correctly calculate a dose doesn’t matter much if the medication itself is incorrect or the dosing instructions are unclear. Some abbreviations in prescriptions are unacceptable because they cause ambiguity and confusion (the enemies of patient safety and quality healthcare!). For this reason, you don’t want to see these abbreviations on any medical orders you work with.