Half Life Application Essay

When I was eleven, I went to Montana to do an internship with a family friend who is a veterinarian. I was so excited that I was going to Montana, to work with animals. This was ranching country. Some people would call it the middle of nowhere, but I call it paradise. On the first day, I went to the clinic. The vet explained what we were going to do that day. We needed to treat 50 head of cattle for a rancher. As we were gathering supplies, she asked me, “How much medicine will we need, if we are treating 50 head of cattle and they all weigh around 800 pounds? They need 20 mg/100 lbs.” I thought to myself, “What?, I came here expecting physical labor, but not a math quiz!” Up until this point, math was just something I learned in each grade so that I could do the math in the next grade. At the time, we had work to …show more content…
For example, more advanced concepts are needed when trying to find out how often the patient needs to take their medicine. When thinking about how often to administer a dose, it helps to understand the concept half life. The half life of a drug being absorbed in the body is the time needed so that one has 50 percent of what was administered. Half life can be graphed as exponential decay. This is useful because when one knows what the rate of the half life is, one can calculate when the medicine needs to be taken. It is not so much that veterinarians would calculate based on the half life. It is more that veterinarians need to understand the concept of half life. For example, if a dose of 1000mg is given and the half life is 6 hours. After six hours there would be 500mg left. However, a veterinarian needs to understand that all the medicine would not be gone after six hours. On that first trip when I was eleven, we did not talk about exponential functions. However, every time I go back, the vet keeps teaching me more and more about how math is used in the veterinary