Disease management, pharmaceutical approach

In this chapter I have described how enthusiastically the new drugs were received when they were introduced into psychiatry in the 1950s and 1960s and how they appeared to take over the mantle of interest that had been associated with the physical treatments. The whole of medicine in this era was searching for disease-specific treatments, and the psychiatric profession had additional professional motives to desire this sort of treatment. Western governments also supported a medical approach to the management of madness and distress, which stressed the similarity of general medicine and psychiatry. The pharmaceutical... 

One of the newest and potentially most interesting areas for chemotherapy is the inhibition of proteases. This is of intense pharmaceutical interest for the management of high blood pressure and of viral diseases. The difficulty with this approach lies in the fact that the proteases use common mechanisms in the mammalian host and microorganisms. Nevertheless, specificity of inhibition has been achieved for the mammalian enzyme renin for the control of high blood pressure and for the protease used for replication of the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS. For this reason, there is reason to be encouraged that inhibition of proteases in parasitic organisms will be an effective means of chemotherapy. 

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