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Most of us take medications on a daily basis, or at least as needed. However, few people wonder how it actually happens that specific preparations are found in our pharmacies, or who tests their effects. Meanwhile, the answers to these questions are provided by pharmacology, i.e. the science of the influence of drugs on the human body.
Pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals, pharmacology – are they all the same?
In colloquial language, the terms pharmacy, pharmaceuticals and pharmacology are sometimes used interchangeably, treating them as names of the broadly understood pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, these concepts, although related to each other, in fact relate to separate issues.
- Pharmacy is the most general term for a set of various sciences related to drugs and other substances that have an impact on human health. Pharmacy includes pharmacology, but also toxicology and bromatology, i.e. the science that studies the effect of food on the human body.
- Pharmaceuticals is not a science in the strict sense of the word, but a branch of the economy dealing with research, production, marketing and sale of drugs. Pharmaceuticals use the achievements of all branches of pharmacy to carry out in practice an effective and safe trade in drugs on the principles of the modern economic system.
- Pharmacology is a branch of pharmacy that studies the effects of drugs on the human body. It is pharmacological research that provides us with knowledge about how drugs affect us, what their side effects are, how the body metabolizes them, and in what doses they should be used.
This means that the pharmacologist rarely deals directly with the patient. Rather, the pharmacologist’s workplace is a laboratory. Although we, as patients, have little contact with the activities that make up this work, each of us has to deal with its effects. All information that we find in drug leaflets was obtained as a result of pharmacological tests.
What is pharmacology?
There are two main research areas within pharmacology. The first is pharmacokinetics, the science of how the body interacts with a drug. The key to studying this impact is the so-called ADME:
- And how is absorption, or how the drug gets into the body,
- D for distribution, i.e. how the drug travels inside the body,
- M for metabolism, or how the body transforms the drug,
- E is for elimination, or how the drug leaves the body.
The second area of pharmacology is pharmacodynamics, i.e. studying the effect of a drug on the body: how it affects the systemic conditions, the behavior of specific cells or receptors. Thanks to this, side effects, dosage and safety of the drug are determined.
What is the work of a pharmacologist?
In practice, the main task of pharmacologists is to test drugs before approval and for some time afterwards. The standard procedure for placing a medicine on the market is as follows:
- The first stage of research is the preclinical phase, i.e. testing without human participation. The drug must be tested in at least two species of animals during this phase.
If the drug in the preclinical phase has not shown extreme toxicity, the clinical phase of the study begins in which it is tested on volunteers. The clinical phase takes place in several stages:
- In the initial phase, the drug is given to several people to assess whether people can use it safely.
- The orientation phase consists in testing the drug on a dozen or so patients, but in at least three different research centers. These are tests with the so-called a control group in which some patients take a placebo so that the effect of the drug can be tested.
- Appropriate control tests – this phase also compares the effect of the drug with a placebo, but on a much larger group of patients (there may be, for example, a thousand or more) in many research centers. The passage of this phase is a condition for the drug to be put on sale.
- The extended phase – consists in supervising a newly introduced drug, e.g. by monitoring reports of adverse reactions.