Упрощенная HTML-версия
149
1. Read the text and answer the following questions:
1. What is pharmacopoeia?
2. When was it produced?
3. How are medicines classified?
4. What is palliative practice?
5. How are medicines on the market grouped? Give some examples.
6. What can you say about a double blind trial?
Early in human history, our ancestors discovered that certain
plants could ease pain and cure illness. Prayer and magic came into it
too, and symbolic actions such as drinking the blood of a warrior to
take his strength, and using leaves and roots as medicine for body
parts they somehow resembled, were logical extensions of the beliefs
of the time.
The first pharmacopoeia (list of medicinal plants) was produced
in 3,500BC by the Chinese emperor Shen Nung, and herbal remedies
remained the basis for medicines for centuries. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries they were supplemented by frightening prepara-
tions of poisonous substances such as mercury, arsenic, and phospho-
rous, and used alongside leeches, bleeding, and laxatives. This period
was many inventions and discoveries away from the white coats,
stethoscopes, and the smell of disinfectant that characterize medical
care today. However, the developments that went on did give rise to a
new understanding of the chemistry and biology of the natural world,
and eventually generated medicines that could be said to have changed
the way people live: analgesics like Aspirin, anaesthetics, vaccina-
tions, Penicillin and antibiotics, contraceptives, and Viagra.
Scientists who design and produce new drugs assume that a drug's
effects are directly related to its molecular structure, and either syn-
thesize medicines by reproducing the medicinally active parts of
plants, or extract the medicinally active parts of plants and use them.
Medicines are classified by:
– their chemical properties. The opioids are a well-known example
of a chemical group of medicines, as are benzodiazepines and
barbiturates.
–
their mode of administration. Medications can be taken in a varie-
ty of different ways – orally, for example, in the form of pills,
capsules, and liquid, through the skin via patches, by subcutane-