Medicinal effects drug uses

The purpose of this discussion of science, clearly, is to apply it to herbal medicine. The reputed uses of drugs may not always be accurate or effective. Applying the scientific method to herbal medicine therefore allows us to test the traditional uses and to know with greater certainty what an herbal medication does and how reliably it does it. Although far from infallible, the process as a whole gives us greater confidence in our conclusions. 

The chemistry we use in our everyday life is generally beneficial to us for example, processed foods, medicines, pharmaceuticals, scents, detergents, fibres and fabrics, plastics, processed metals, paints and wall coverings, dyestuffs, fuels, bricks and ceramics, improved food production by the use of fertilisers and insecticides, and many more. Society often forgets all of these, and it has become a fashionable thing to blame the scientists for all the pollution in our world. But we, the consumers, decide what we want for a better lifestyle. We want more effective drugs, materials and food processing, etc., but all development requires expensive and tested research. 

The odds of successfully finding new drugs are indeed minute hundreds of thousands of compounds are made and tested by the thousands of scientists in the pharmaceutical industry each year to find the few compounds with the attributes to be significant, effective therapeutic products. A new chemical entity (NCE) is a term the pharmaceutical industry uses to describe drugs whose active ingredients have not been sold before. In recent years, only 20-25 NCEs were approved as medicines by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year. Worldwide, about 40-45 NCEs are approved each year. 

Because of the power of the placebo effect, almost anything that is believed in seems to work for some types of medical problems. That is why the late Arthur K. Shapiro described the history of medicine as largely the history of the placebo effect.4 It is also why clinical experience alone cannot tell us whether a particular physical substance is an effective treatment. Placebo-controlled trials are required to demonstrate drug efficacy before drugs are approved for marketing. 

Herbal medicines contain active drugs, in every sense of the word. As such, the principles of pharmacology pertain to them and allow us to understand their effects. The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of these principles. For a more complete treatment of the topic, the reader is directed to the sources listed in the references. Although these principles apply to all drugs, this chapter will draw upon examples from plant drugs to illustrate them. 

With respect to veterinary medicines, the US-FDA establishes tolerances to include a safety factor to assure that the drug will have no harmful effects on consumers of the food product. The US-FDA first determines the level at which the dmg does not produce any measurable effect in laboratory animals. From this, the US-FDA determines an acceptable daily intake (ADI), and the drug tolerance and withdrawal times are then determined so that the concentrations of dmg residues in edible tissues are below the ADI. Depending on the dmg, safety factors of between 100-fold to 2000-fold are included in the calculations used to set the tolerances. 

Additional studies, such as those conducted by the US Institute of Medicine Report (lOM) in 1988, also attempted to determine the impact of drug usage in food-producing animals on antimicrobial resistance of human pathogens, using penicillin and tetracycline on Salmonella as a model. The authors of this study attempted to describe the extent to which transfer of resistance factors occurred between human and animals and to define whether the risk to human therapy was enough to outweigh the benefits of a cost-effective food supply. The result of the lOM Report was that the information available to answer the question was insufficient. 

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