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Pharmacy (from the Greek φάρμακον = drug) is a transitional field between health sciences and chemical sciences and a profession charged with ensuring the safe use of medication. Traditionally, pharmacists have compounded and dispensed medications based on prescriptions from physicians. More recently, pharmacy has come to include other services related to patient care including clinical practice, medication review, and drug information. Some of these new pharmaceutical roles are now mandated by law in various legislatures. Pharmacists, therefore, are drug therapy experts, and the primary health professionals who optimise medication management to produce positive health-outcomes.
Pharmacology (in Greek: pharmacon (φάρμακον) meaning drug, and logos (λόγος) meaning science) is the study of how substances interact with living organisms to produce a change in function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals. The field encompasses drug composition and properties, interactions, toxicology, therapies, medical applications, and antipathogenic capabilities.
The field of pharmacy can generally be divided into three main disciplines:
- Pharmaceutics and industrial pharmacy which concerns on how to convert medication and drugs to suitable drug dosage forms.
- Pharmaceutical Sciences: including pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmacognosy, phytochemistry and also pharmacology.
- Pharmacy practice: which concerns over dispensing medication correctly. Recently this field has developed into hospital pharmacy and clinical pharmacy, all these field are concentrated on optimizing patient care.
Inside every branch of pharmacy there are many specialized branches related to many scientific disciplines. This makes pharmaceuticals related to the majority of pure and applied sciences. for example, medicinal chemistry can be divided into: ADME, bioavailability, chemogenomics, drug design, drug discovery, enzyme inhibition, mechanism of action, new chemical entity, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, pharmacology , pharmacophore perception, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship, and Structure-Activity Relationship.
Many other sciences are also related to many branches of pharmacy: we can mention physical chemistry including mixing and mass transfer which makes basis for pharmaceutics. The quality control process which is so necessary after the pharmaceutical production depends essentially on analytical chemistry.
Biology (including molecular biology and biochemistry), physiology, organic chemistry, microbiology, parasitology , and also botany are all related in some way with one of pharmacy sciences. Recently the field of drug discovery and drug design has developed with the new technologies invented in other fields like bioinformatics, cheminformatics, computational chemistry, genetics, and proteomics.
An Antioxidant is a molecule capable of slowing or preventing the oxidation of other molecules. Oxidation is a chemical reaction that transfers electrons from a substance to an oxidizing agent. Oxidation reactions can produce free radicals, which start chain reactions that damage cells. Antioxidants terminate these chain reactions by removing radical intermediates, and inhibit other oxidation reactions by being oxidized themselves. As a result, antioxidants are often reducing agents such as thiols or polyphenols.
Although oxidation reactions are crucial for life, they can also be damaging; hence, plants and animals maintain complex systems of multiple types of antioxidants, such as glutathione, vitamin C, and vitamin E as well as enzymes such as catalase, superoxide dismutase and various peroxidases. Low levels of antioxidants, or inhibition of the antioxidant enzymes causes oxidative stress and may damage or kill cells. As oxidative stress has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many human diseases, the use of antioxidants in pharmacology is intensively studied, particularly as treatments for stroke and neurodegenerative diseases. However, it is unknown whether oxidative stress is the cause or the consequence of such diseases. Antioxidants are also widely used as ingredients in dietary supplements in the hope of maintaining health and preventing diseases such as cancer and coronary heart disease.
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- ...Thalidomide is a drug that was sold during the late 1950s and 1960s to pregnant women as an antiemetic? It was later found to be teratogenic, causing amelia and phocomelia. However, it is still used for other indications such as for leprosy and multiple myeloma, with close regulation through the System for Thalidomide Education and Prescribing Safety (STEPS) program.
- The therapeutic index of a medication is a comparison of the amount that causes the therapeutic effect to the amount that causes toxic effects. Quantitatively, it is the ratio of the dose required to produce the desired therapeutic effect and the toxic dose. A commonly used measure of therapeutic index is the effective dose of a drug for 50% of the population (ED50) divided by the lethal dose for 50% of the population (LD50).
- List of pharmacies
- List of pharmacy associations
- List of pharmacy organizations in the United Kingdom
- List of diseases
- List of drugs
- List of top selling drugs
- List of pharmaceutical companies
- List of pharmacy schools
- List of pharmacy schools in the United Kingdom
- List of universities in the United Kingdom
- List of pharmacy organizations in the United Kingdom
- List of medical schools in the United Kingdom
- List of American state universities
- List of medical schools
- Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain
- School of Pharmacy
- Pharmaceutics and Industrial pharmacy: Including Pharmaceutical technology and Dermopharmacy and Cosmetics.
- Pharmaceutical Sciences : including Pharmaceutical chemistry , Pharmacognosy , Phytochemistry and Pharmacology.
- Pharmacy practice : which is primarily concerned with optimizing the use of medications in patient care. Examples include Hospital pharmacy and Clinical pharmacy.
- Essential Projects
- Other Projects
Pharmacy schools :
- The Official World List of Pharmacy Schools (WLPS) - The Academic Section, International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP)
- Pharmacy Schools on the WWW - Virtual Library Pharmacy
- Accredited Professional Programs of Colleges and Schools of Pharmacy - Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), United States
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Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 23 March 2008, at 11:27.
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