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
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