Mohamed H. Dahir (Chairman, Pharmaceutical Association of Somaliland)
Those people studied made mistakes in the way they took their medication - either too much, not enough, or at the wrong time. Doctors like to blame their uncooperative patients for these errors, but according to these researches for the problem really lies with the physician for not communicating the instructions simply and clearly.
The true goal of this article, then, is to provide people with basic information regarding the potential hazards of drugs as well as of those medications physicians prescribe most often. My hope is to enable people understand how the medicines they take work in their bodies and how to approach simple medical problems before, during, and after professional medical intervention. It may help save you some money, but more important, it may help save your life.
What is a Drug?
With so much misinformation, emotion, and plain ignorance surrounding the whole field of "drugs" today, it is no wonder that people are confused and apprehensive. Our so-called drug culture is a never-ending source of editorials, commercials, and apprehension. Yet drugs are nothing new to our generation. The ancient Egyptians were masters of drug therapy, and one medical papyrus lists over nine hundred prescriptions. In fact, it is very likely that as far back as 2000 BC, Egyptian physicians were treating wounds and infections with a chemical derived from a fungus which probably was a near relative to penicillin. There is even a suggestion in some ancient manuscripts that the Egyptians might have had a birth control pill. Almost every culture has taken advantage of the chemicals nature has provided in the form of leaves, roots and bark in order to fashion remedies and cures. Such staples of modern therapeutics as aspirin, digitalis, and quinine (first used for fevers, then for malaria) are derived from natural plants. From a bird’s-eye view, it is only fairly recently that we have learned how to isolate the active ingredients in plants and synthesize our own by-products chemically.
So what is a drug? Well, in reality it is just a word, which exists in people’s minds. When potato first reached arrived in Europe, it was considered something very special, selling not as a food but rather - at high price - as a "medicine" for its aphrodisiac quantities. In its broadest sense, most people would consider any prescriptive agent a drug and, as a result of the current furor over abuse, any agent which is used illicitly for its physiological effects. Either naively or unconsciously, people generally fail to realize that many of the chemicals they casually consume are themselves drugs. As defined by standard pharmacological textbook, a drug is "any chemical agent that effects living matter".
Are vitamins drugs? Most people would say No without thinking twice. However, when Vitamin C is ingested in very large amounts - for example - it is no longer the simple vitamin you find in your orange juice. Nor does the eighteen-year girl who was taking really huge amounts of Vitamin A daily for her acne typify a simple case of the ingestion of a natural product found carrots. She wound up in a hospital with severe headache, blurred vision, sleep disturbances, signs of mental illness, and an initial diagnosis of a brain tumor. All this was due to excessive amounts of Vitamin A.
No one in his right mind would ever classify cigarettes, aspirin, food additives, or air as drugs. Yet nicotine, alcohol, aspirin, nitrates, and yes, even air-or more specifically oxygen-each has a distinct pharmacology with special effects upon your body, (premature babies given large doses of oxygen may suffer from irreversible blindness.) Perhaps I overstate the case; yet we have been lulled into complacency about what we put into our bodies, both by the industries that manufacture and advertise their products and by the doctors who prescribe them. Remember, one study reported that 60 percent of patients consider their drugs completely safe.
To be continued next week
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