It's like knowing the dose the ferret is getting. Without having the
concentration it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how much medication is present.

I don't know what the current readily available concentrations of
prednisolone are but they had been:

1mg/ml,
3mg/ml,
5 mg/ml,
7mg/ml, and
10 mg/ml

Compounded meds can be of other concentrations.

Think of this like muddy water. You might have a thin but tinted water
due to a little bit of soil being in there or you can have something
thick which has a lot of soil in the same amount of water.

So, too, medications with a variety of concentrations. The more
concentrated the medication is (the more mg --which is weight of
medication -- per ml -- which is the liquid volume measure, i.e. how
much space the liquid takes up) the more medication there is in it.

An ml of 10 mg/ml Prednisolone has twice as much medication in it as
an ml of 5 mg/ml Prednisolone.

An ml of 3/mg/ml Prednisolone has three times as much medication in it
as an ml of 1 mg/ml Prednisolone.

BTW, look at BOTH numbers. The numeral "1" can be hard to read so often
1 mg/ml is written as 5mg/5ml. Divide 5 by 5 and you get 1.

Look, too for decimal points in doses. It is best to put a zero before
a decimal point if no other number resides there so that decimal point
will not be missed. 0.1 means one tenth. 0.01 means one one hundredth.

So, one person might be giving 0.3 ml of the 1 mg/ml concentration, but
another might be giving 0.3 ml of the 5/mg/ml concentration. The second
one is giving 5 times as much med as the first, or said a different way
the first one is giving 1/5th of the med that the second one is giving.

That is also true for purchases. The same volume of 1 mg/ml med is
going to cost less than the concentrations with more medication in
them. Most people are not going to pay for mud slurries so this time
imagine some quartz with gold flakes in it, the more gold in the volume
of quartz, the more the specimen is going to cost. For some pretty
visual aids to help that get across:
http://www.origsix.com/catalog2.asp?catid=35
Hey, whatever helps a concept take hold!

The gold in those is visible and not in a liquid but can see that some
specimens are the same size as others but have less gold. That's the
same with concentrations. The less concentrated the medication, the
less gold -- opps, medication -- in the same size.

BTW, pills, capsules, and caplets also sometimes come with different
concentrations available.

BTW, ours object least to the flavor of 1 mg/ml Prednisolone in a
generic form we get at the A&P pharmacy, but there are other other
meds for which we use compounding, and if a heavy concentration of
Prednisolone must be given be use Belvidere in NJ. The Compounding
Pharmacies is a list of places which actually know ferrets and what
is safe for them (for example, a pharmacy which does not know ferrets
might use a stevia flavored compound -- information lacking in ferrets
but some popular sites have unchecked warnings w dogs and there are
studies indicating that it may drop blood glucose which is dangerous w
insulinoma-- or a Xylitol based one -- fatal -- without knowing better
because that pharmacy does not have the right veterinary background).
The Compounding Pharmacies List can be found in:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/files/

This recent post has a lot of useful links on compounding including
how to find an ACCREDITED compounding pharmacy because having taken
an introduction to compounding is very different from having more
intensively studied compounding:

http://ferrethealth.org/archive/FHL12859

I will copy this to the FHL because some people there might also find
it useful.

Sukie (not a vet)

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
all ferret topics:
http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html
"All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow."
(2010, Steve Crandall)
On change for its own sake: "You can go really fast if you just jump
off the cliff." (2010, Steve Crandall)

[Posted in FML 6979]