Simulated drug administration: an emerging tool for teaching clinical pharmacology during anesthesiology training.

ABSTRACT

A thorough understanding of the dose-response relationship is required for optimizing the efficacy of anesthetics while minimizing adverse drug effects. Nowadays, except for the inhaled anesthetics (for which end-tidal concentrations can be measured online), most of the drugs used in clinical anesthesia are administered using standard dosing guidelines, without giving due consideration to their pharmacokinetics and dynamics in guiding their administration. Various studies have found that introducing pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics as part of the inputs in clinical anesthesiology could lead to better patient care. With this in mind, it is extremely important that clinicians understand and apply the principles of clinical pharmacology that determine the time course of a drug's disposition and effect. Clinical pharmacology is one of the most challenging topics to teach in anesthesiology. The development of simulators to illustrate the time course of a drug's disposition and effect provides online visualization of pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic information during the clinical use of anesthetics. The aim of this review is to discuss the importance of simulation as a clinical pharmacology teaching tool for trainees in anesthesiology.