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Erythromycin is an antibiotic that’s very important to know and its trade name is a myosin the reason it’s so important to understand and to know is because it can actually be useful in place of penicillin when penicillin can’t be taken for example if the patient has a penicillin allergy it’s very helpful in treat a wide range of infections things like upper and
Lower respiratory infections otitis media skin infection pertussis syphilis rheumatic fever and can even be used in pregnancy to prevent group b strep the way that it works it actually suppresses bacterial protein synthesis and this is known as bacteriostatic activity so what it really does does it just prevents additional growth inhibits that growth of the bacteria
Now unfortunately there are some very important nursing considerations and side effects to keep in mind first of all it’s important to understand that erythromycin can cause qt prolongation which can lead to severe ventricular arrhythmias so we know we have our pqrst and so that qt interval you know which is really the systolic phase is important to understand and
To know that if we elongate that qt interval interfering with that ventricular action and if we elongate that long enough we can actually lead to v-tach okay it can also lead to diarrhea we want to monitor our our liver function test our l.f.t.s because it is metabolized by the liver we realign it what we really want to instruct our patient on proper dosage of
Retro myosin because what can happen a lot of times as patients will be prescribed an antibiotic they’ll take it until they feel better until they see the infection subsiding and then they will stop and that doesn’t really completely take care of the infection so it’s really important that they take the medication as prescribed for the entire term of the the dose
Another important consideration with all antibiotics and we talked about this a lot in the podcast is that it’s important to understand that you need to assess the infection prior to administering the medication it’s really important to assess and see what type of bacteria we’re doing with and what we’re really trying to target prior to giving this so for going
To draw any blood cultures you want to do it before the first dose so we can get a accurate blood culture before we start dosing the medication and we want to assess the infection we want to see okay is this actually helping did it do any good are we actually treating the patient so therapeutic classes anti-infective pharmacologic class is macro lit this has been
Another episode of the med master podcast by in our sng comm to get our free cheat sheet cover the 50 most commonly prescribed medications head over to nrs ng comm slash 50 meds that’s in our s ng comm slash 50 meds thank you so much for joining me today and thank you for being part of the nrs ng family we’re here to help you succeed in nursing school and in life
So start your journey today over at nrs ng comm slash 50 meds we’re glad to have you aboard you know what time it is now it’s time to go out and be your best self today happy nursing yell you
Transcribed from video
Erythromycin Nursing Considerations, Side Effects, and Mechanism of Action Pharmacology for Nurses By NURSINGcom