Feature Story:
Pills for all ills
Pharmaceuticals have revolutionized medical practice. Julie Mitchell looks at how they have eradicated most of the world’s killer diseases, enabled surgeons to perform complex, life-saving, procedures and helped millions of people with chronic conditions to have a better quality of life.
Almost everyone needs medication of some kind to prevent or treat illness. As a child you may be vaccinated against a range of diseases, including tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, mumps and rubella. Then, as you go through life, it is likely that a visit to your GP (general practitioner) will result in a prescription.
These days it seems that there truly are “pills for all ills”. You can get drugs to help you sleep, relieve pain, reduce inflammation, kill infection, combat depression, reduce cholesterol, prevent pregnancy, as an aid to quitting smoking… the list is practically endless.
Even people who rarely need to consult a doctor will still have a variety of products in their medicine cabinets that they bought over-the-counter from the pharmacy – pain killers, cough mixture, indigestion tablets, throat lozenges, cream for insect bites, those tablets you bought on holiday for an upset stomach.
Of course, as we know, there are still many devastating diseases with no known cure, in particular HIV/AIDS and cancer. While effective medicines for these and other fatal conditions continue to be the Holy Grail for research scientists, there are a variety of pharmaceutical preparations available to help prolong the lives of sufferers.
These synthetic drugs are undoubtedly essential to medicine today but, in historical terms, they are a relatively recent development ... Download the Magazine (below) to read the complete article
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