Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I hope you're enjoying it so far.

If it's your first episode, you're listening, thank you so much. And hopefully you can find some

clinical practice pearls that are relevant to your practice or maybe help you in your board exam

or pharmacology exam if you're still in school.

So today the drug of the day is coding.

And with this medication, I will say that I've practiced pharmacy for over 10 years now,

been in various settings, long-term care consulting,

ambulatory care right in a clinic, in a retail community pharmacy.

And the use of this drug has definitely declined over time.

And I'm going to give you some examples as to what makes coding so special and so

unique as we go through the podcast here. So mechanistically, I think the important thing to remember,

coding is an opioid. So like many of the other opioids, like hydrocodone, for example, that I've

covered, it binds the CNS opioid receptors and ultimately stimulates them. This reduces that

perception of pain. That's ultimately what opioids do in the central nervous system. They don't act at the

site of action. So if you've got pain in your finger, it doesn't help with inflammation or

anything like that. It basically blunts the signals that are being sent to the brain and that perception of

those signals is essentially how opioids work. Brand names, Tylenol number three is the one that I recall

most vividly from my memory.

And I would say I don't see it very often anymore.

And again, like I said, it's to some of the complicated things.

But when I first graduated and was going through internships, things of that nature,

in the 2000s, late 2000s, I definitely saw a fair amount of Tylenol number three.

...