Can you tell if a patient is taking their medications as prescribed from the quantitation results?
Generally yes, but concentration ranges cannot be specified. Different pain patients are on vastly different dosages of the same drugs. One patient might routinely take a dose of morphine which would be fatal to a naïve patient. As mentioned earlier, we generally do not know when the last dose of medication was taken, or how large the dose was. A particular quantitation result may superficially appear to be consistent with a clinical dose of a drug, but in realty may be the value much longer after an abuse dose of the drug. Exceedingly high drug or metabolite concentrations can be flagged as suspicious, as can be the absence of required drugs. The presence of non-prescribed drugs can also be of value in evaluation of compliance.
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