Titration planner

This page is a totaliser, and that distinction matters more than anything else on it. The steps it adds up are not derived here and could not be. They come from a dose escalation schedule published in an approved product label, and the page names that label rather than treating a schedule as a general property of anything. That is not pedantry. Approvals are granted product by product and jurisdiction by jurisdiction, so two products containing the same molecule can carry genuinely different published sequences, and a schedule read from one of them is not evidence about the other.

Making the input a citation rather than a number is what makes the output auditable. When a total looks wrong, the first question is not whether the arithmetic slipped but whether the schedule quoted is the schedule in the document, and a page that accepted a typed-in sequence could never tell you which of those two went wrong. The corollary is a hard limit on what any result here means: it is a total of a published document expressed in milligrams and microlitres, and it says nothing at all about whether that document was appropriate for anyone. The guide to reading a published titration schedule covers what a label actually states and where it stops, and the site disclaimer is where this site puts its own boundary in full.

Each step of a schedule carries an amount, a frequency and a duration, and the amount consumed across it is the product of those three. Add the products across the steps and you have the total. Written out, the sequence of step amounts forms a geometric progression whenever each step is the one before it multiplied by a fixed ratio, and that gives the total a closed form: the opening amount times the sum of the ratio raised from zero to the number of steps less one. The structure is worth seeing even though this page multiplies it out step by step, because it shows precisely three things controlling the total, namely the opening amount, the ratio between steps, and how many steps there are.

It also shows why a total is a poor summary on its own. Two schedules that arrive at the same place can differ enormously in how much substance they consume, because one that moves in many small increments accumulates more than one that moves in fewer larger ones, and the total reports that difference without explaining where it came from. A total is therefore a number to compare rather than a number to reason from. Once you have one, the batch cost calculator turns it into money and the batch scaling calculator resizes a specification of this shape, but neither can tell you which schedule is the right one to size in the first place.

The final step of a published schedule usually has no fixed duration, and that is a property of the labelling rather than an oversight in it. Without a count of steps there is no sum to compute, and an unbounded series has no finite total: the quantity the sum is heading for grows without limit, and only the amount consumed per period stays finite. A calculator that returned a total for such a step would be silently inventing an endpoint, so this one reports a per-period rate instead and says as much. Treating that rate as though it were a total, or giving the step an end date that it does not have, is the most common way a plan total comes out wrong.

A held step does the same job for a different reason. Holding is a real event in a real schedule, it changes total consumption without changing any amount anywhere, and nothing in the multiplication knows how long a hold lasted. A total built from nominal durations is therefore a lower bound rather than an estimate, and the gap is invisible in the output. The usage calculator is the honest way to turn a rate into a quantity, because it makes the period being assumed explicit rather than burying it, and the working solution calculator handles the separate question of expressing a fixed amount as a draw volume at a chosen concentration.

This page will not tell you what the steps of any schedule are, where to start, how large a step change should be, or how long a step should be held, and the omission is deliberate rather than accidental: those are prescribing decisions that belong to the clinician who wrote the label, and no arithmetic on a web page can make them responsibly. Printing them here would turn a document written for one product in one jurisdiction into a default for whoever happens to be reading, which is precisely the failure this site exists to avoid.

What it does offer is the conversion of a document you already hold into the units you need: a total mass, an administration count, a duration for the finite part, and per-step draw volumes on the syringe calibration you chose. Every one of those is a change of units applied to numbers somebody else decided. Which document those numbers should come from, and whether they should be acted on at all, is a conversation with a prescriber and a reading of the product documentation rather than a calculation. Anyone who takes a number from this page and treats it as a plan has used the tool exactly backwards, and both the site FAQ and the guide to using the site say the same thing about that in less detail.