Therapeutic Heroin Levels

Sometimes, it is difficult to organize your thoughts into anything coherent after a long, difficult shift.  One morning, I was giving report to a day nurse and I said, "The patient is therapeutic on heroin, so the next PTT will be tomorrow morning."

The oncoming nurse looked at me strangely.  

I corrected myself hastily.  "Heparin!  Heparin!  They're therapeutic on heparin!  I don't actually know what their heroin level is..."

It caused me to wonder--what IS a therapeutic heroin level? 

I did some informal research on this burning topic.  The nurses all had different answers, but the best response was, "Somewhere between remembering to brush your teeth and chewing some guy's face off."

So, here's the scale:

Supratherapeutic:

 

     Subtherapeutic