Dosage for IV morphine ED50/LD50?

[Huntley]

Hello, I'm looking for intravenous morphine dosages.
Having trouble finding resources.

Looking for ED50 and LD50 represented in ml/kg values?
Also having trouble finding good scholarly articles about morphine overdose.

So far I'm just going over some mechanism of actions stuff. I'm no pharmacology expert, but I do have some chemistry (actually geoscience) background.

Background: a hospital overdosed my friend on morphine diazepam combo. He is dead at a young age.
many of the older members of his family are quite religious (unlike myself) and justify this as "god's will" or "his time on Earth". I was brought up to investigate and deduce.

Help in the form of illuminating knowledge would be greatly appreciated- thank you.

 

[Coraline]

Any nursing drug book has the mg/kg dosage. But that dosage is usually for children due to their body water content. It is true kids are not little people in that aspect. Kg is 2.2 lb 1 lb = .45 kg. Usually the overdose is from respitory depression. The patient stops breathing. I'm so sorry to hear that about your friend. That is terrible.

 

[effie]

I'm really sorry to hear about your friend...

The difficulty with the information you require is that everyone is different - what is a safe dose for one person is a dangerous dose for another. I know this is true for everything (hence the concept of LD50) but it is especially true for opioids. It also depends hugely on other medications (downers such as diazepam, but other medications your friend might have been on) so even armed with facts such as those it won't help you hugely to undersand what happened to your friend. Prescribing books will often give an initial IV bolus or infusion dosage but no upper limit as the idea is you titrate it up until the pain is controlled while monitoring the patient for signs of toxicity, so this may be why you are finding it so hard to track down what you are looking for.

There is some information on morphine here but really I would recommend discussing this with a doctor - the doctors who treated your friend may be willing to meet with you to talk about what happened and the hospital as a whole should certainly investigate it and discuss it with you all if an error occurred - this should be standard policy. Another person you could speak to would be the pathologist involved - I imagine they could be hugely useful - or even speak to your own doctor if you want someone medical but removed from the situation.

If you believe the hospital was negligent, this is a legal matter and isn't really something we can discuss here, I'm sorry.. I am also concerned that reading scholarly articles on the mechanism of your friend's death will be distressing; I find this to be the case with regards to the person I lost, and I have some background in that area and like you need to understand what happened. I'm sorry if that sounds patronising, it isn't meant to at all and I completely empthise with where you are coming from, but I don't think that this forum is the right place for this.

I am going to close this but please send me a pm if this is something you would like to discuss further. I am really sorry for the death of your friend - I know what that feels like; losing a loved one is truly the most awful experience we can go through. I would also recommend taking a look at The Dark Side forum (link in my sig) - there is a grief/bereavement thread which you might find helpful.

Closed.