The Science and Art of Pharmacy

Have you experience taking a medication and notices that for some reasons you cannot feel the supposed effects? Or taken so much than the prescribed dosage and it makes you nervous what could be the adverse side-effects… It is a great thing that there is a science that deals with the safe and proper use of various medications to attain the expected remedy.

Pharmacy is the simply the science and art of developing drugs and making them accessible to the general public for consumption. A person practicing pharmacy is called a pharmacist. But over time, the field of pharmacy has also evolved and includes more than the traditional functions. Pharmacy also involves modern services such as patient care, clinical services, medication review, and drug information dissemination. Below are the primary disciplines of pharmacy:

• Pharmaceutics

Formulating a new chemical entity (NCE) into a medicine that can be safely and effectively used by patients is the major responsibility of pharmaceutics. From ingredient selection, process treatment to dosage preparation – capsule, cream, eye drop, implant, inhalation, injection, ointment, powder, or tablet, pharmaceutics is the branch of pharmacy that involves every aspect of new medication preparation. Its sub-areas include pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacogenomics, pharmaceutical formulation, and pharmaceutical technology.

• Medicinal Chemistry

Pharmaceutical or medicinal chemistry is a discipline in between of pharmacology and chemistry. It deals with the designing, synthesizing and development of new chemical entities appropriate for therapeutic purposes. Medicinal chemistry also involves the analysis of existing drugs, their natural properties, and their quantitative structure0activity relationships (QSAR). The fields of computational chemistry, molecular biology, organic chemistry, pharmacognosy, physical chemistry and statistics are also connected with medicinal chemistry.

• Pharmacy Practice

There are various professional roles a pharmacist can pursue. The pharmacy practice is the field of pharmacy that regulates, administers and monitors the development of such roles. It includes the following areas: drug discovery and evaluation; extemporaneous pharmaceutical compounding; clinical intervention; pharmaceutical care; drug-abuse prevention; prevention of adverse events; health psychology; disease-state management; drug discovery and evaluation; and detect pharmacotherapy-related problems.

• Pharmacology

Though occasionally regarded as a fourth discipline and important to the study of pharmacy, pharmacology is not quite specific to pharmacy. It is therefore viewed as an area of general sciences.

The mortal and pestle is the international symbol recognized to stand for the pharmacy profession. The second widely used is the “rx” text symbol commonly printed in doctors’ prescriptions. Other international symbols include the Bowl of Hygeia and the Caduceus. In Belgium, France, Spain and the UK, the green Greek cross is commonly used. In Austria and Germany, the red stylized letter A is applied.

So the next time your doctor tells you to take your medication twice a day follow his advice. When you purchase a headache pain reliever at it says on the label to be taken every 5 hours or so, I suggest you follow them since I am sure it wasn’t put there for no reasons. Remember that there is actually a science to make sure we take a correct medicine at the proper time with the proper dosage. Stay healthy!!!