This is one we know most healthcare providers have seen!
1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient
2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer
3. Quick Wrap-up
Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.
Counselling Conundrum: "I used to take 2 mg of something called perindopril, but since I was coughing, my Nurse Practitioner switched me to candesartan 4 mg. Won't that be too much? That's double the strength!
Concise Conclusion: I totally understand your confusion! Though it's technically the same number of milligrams, different medications can sometimes be stronger with less of it needed in the pill. In your case, candesartan is half as strong as perindopril so you need twice as much to have the same effect on your blood pressure.
Quick Wrap-up: This always seems to be a tricky thing to explain to patients as there aren't many good analogies. One may be tempted to erroneously compare to different types of alcoholic beverages (e.g. wine, beer, liquor), however if you consume the same amount of alcohol from any type of beverage, the effects likely would be similar. Thankfully, we have found the comparison of sugar and stevia to be helpful; you only need a teaspoonful of stevia powder to match a full cup of table sugar! They are both in the same family (sweeteners), yet one is inherently sweeter so you need much less of it.
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