Talk:Elimination half-life

Proposed merge
This article could be a section of Half-life, or of Biological half-life, or all three could be merged into Exponential decay. There is just not enough distinct material for four distinct articles. Robert A.West (Talk) 00:14, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
 * See Talk:Half-life -Techelf 11:34, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

What about elimination half-life in case of Methadone?
As you can read in the Methadone article (in the Chembox in the upper-left corner) that the half-life of Methadone is 24-36 hours and below under Metabolism section that it can actually range from "... as few as 4 hours to as many as 130 hours". But this is not the main point of my post.

You see, in this section there's nothing mentioned about one certain speciality of Methadone, which is that the actual level of the drug in blood (SML - Serum Methadone Level) is increasing for the 4-5 days until the level of Methadone in blood becomes "stable" (i.e. it's not increasing anymore). I mean, after the initial doze is taken, then after 24 hours when a patient takes another doze, he/she still has half of the previous day's doze in his/her blood serum, therefore the half-life on the 1st day is not the same as on 2nd day (and so on until 5th day).

So what I want to point out is that one "type" of half-life if a drug is consumed just once (and then flushed out of the system), compare to if a drug is consumed one day after another (i.e. more than one day would be enough to make a point in this case).

Please for better understanding what I mean (am trying to say), see Figure 1 on the 2nd page in this Dosing and Safety .pdf file. --Wayfarer (talk) 00:14, 23 October 2010 (UTC)