Not to be confused with other types of electrography or with echocardiography. Electrocardiography (ECG or EKG) is the process of recording the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time using electrodes placed on the skin.
Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. It is considered a brain disease because drugs change the brain; they change its structure and how it works.
Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is a branch of clinical chemistry and clinical pharmacology that specializes in the measurement of medication concentrations in blood. Its main focus is on drugs with a narrow therapeutic range, i.e. drugs that can easily be under-or overdosed.TDM aims at improving patient care by individually adjusting the dose of drugs for which clinical experience or clinical trials have shown it improved outcome in the general or special populations.any different professionals (physicians, clinical pharmacologists, clinical pharmacists, nurses, medical laboratory scientists, etc.) are involved with the various elements of drug concentration monitoring, which is a truly multidisciplinary process.