Dosing guidelines specific medications

The second premise is that medications simply may not react the same in all individuals, and some individuals respond better to certain types of medications than others. Variables of age, body size, body chemistry, habits, and diet can influence the way a specific medication affects the client. Consequently, while general guidelines for prescribing medications exist, prescribers must also remain flexible in individualizing dosing regimens for each client. 

In this chapter, we discuss the pharmacology of medications that are classified as anxiolytic, sedative, or hypnotic—primarily the benzodiazepines, buspirone, zolpidem, eszopiclone, and zale-plon. Subsequently, we present diagnosis-specific treatment guidelines (outlined in Table 3-1). The commonly used anxiolytics and hypnotics, together with their usual doses, are shown in Table 3-2. Many antidepressant medications are also effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders. The pharmacology of antidepressants is discussed in Chapter 2 their clinical use in anxiety disorders is addressed in the diagnosis-specific sections later in this chapter. 

In the context of medical causation. Sir Austin Bradford Hill, suggested in 1965 that to imply causation from the observation of association we should consider its (1) strength, (2) consistency, (3) specificity - the restriction to specific conditions, (4) temporality - the order of events, (5) dose-response relationship, (6) theoretical plausibility, and (7) coherence - the consistency with other related phenomena. Although these guidelines were presented in the context of medicine and epidemiology, it would be very usefiil to keep these necessary conditions for causality in mind when evaluating crash causation on the basis of statistical associations. 

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