Medications
Medications which in common jargon called medicines are agents which are used to treat illness and improve health. They are available in various forms such as tablets, injections, capsules, creams, drops, inhalers and patches. These have been prescribed since 2000 BC with evidence found in Greece, Iraq. These special life saving products are sold in specialized locations called pharmacies. These stores also have a long evolutionary history like medications and a person who works there dispensing medicines is called a pharmacist or Apothecary. This profession also dates back to at least 2600 BC to ancient Babylon. In ancient times, it was Apothecary who were responsible for constructing recipes for various medicines thus making this a skilled profession even during medieval times. They had in depth knowledge of plants, herbs and their medicinal values and would dispense concoctions based on customer’s needs. With the rise of patenting medications in the 1800s, salesmen got involved in selling medications which were manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Modern pharmacy as we know it was born when chemists discovered methods of synthesizing chemicals in labs which were similar to plant sources.
Pharmacist in a pharmacy
These synthetic chemicals which we know as medications are made of 2 main ingredients namely, active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and chemically inactive substance. API is defined by ICH Q7 as “any substance or mixture of substances intended to be used in the manufacture of a drug product and that, when used in the production of a drug, becomes an active ingredient in the drug product.” Inactive chemicals (also called excipients) are binding materials whose main task is to transport the active ingredients to the body. Some of the examples of such excipients are lactose, oleic acid, saccharin. These APIs are especially useful to manufacture generic (cheaper versions of brand-name drugs) medications. API market is classified into 2 broad areas: prescription drugs and over the counter drugs and Teva Pharmaceuticals API division is the world’s leading supplier of APIs. The dosage of a medication that is on the label is actually the concentration of the API present which is determined taking several additional factors into consideration such as bioavailability, physio-chemical properties etc. All new medications need to be first tested in a small group of volunteers for a certain length of time before obtaining approval from health agencies such as FDA (US). One of the crucial factors for considering any approval is knowing the toxic effects of the drugs which in turn is dose dependent. Without this approval from health authorities which deems medicines safe to the public, the drugs cannot be sold in the market. In Spite of this, not all medications are readily available to the public. Some medications as mentioned above are available only when prescribed by a medical professional because when taken unsupervised can have harmful effects while over the counter medications can be bought without a prescription.
Given the history of medications and its streamlined availability in the 21st century, the market today is flooded with medicines which has given rise to a new kind of challenge which is that of wastage. This mainly arises as medicines have expiry dates set by the manufacturer beyond which these medications are not considered very effective in combating the illness. Scientific community is still not very clear of the relevance of expiry dates for drugs as a study conducted by FDA found that 90% of the 100 drugs studied (both prescription and over-the-counter) were effective even after 15 years of being expired. However, a lot more research by various independent labs/companies is required before considering if medicines can indeed be safe to use beyond their expiry date. In the meantime, the best option for all of us is to stay safe and healthy so we don’t have to take too many medications in the first place!
