Medical Drugs

Drugs are substances that affect a body's chemistry.

Medical drugs:

Drugs you take when you're ill to make you feel better.

Recreational drugs:

Categorised into legal and illegal drugs.
Legal drugs include nicotine, alcohol, tobacco.
Illegal drugs include cocaine, cannabis, heroin.

Performance enhancing:

Associated with athletes that make them stronger and faster.

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All new drugs must be first tested to make sure they're safe. This stage is called toxicity testing. It involves testing the drug on cells, tissues and animals in the lab.

Clinical trials are then done with young and healthy volunteers. They are given small doses of the drug to then find out how it affects them.

Further clinical trials are then done. An example of one form of further clinical trialling is a double blind trial which involves volunteers with the illness targeting and the doctor, both of which are blind to whoever gets placebo drugs (False versions of the drug to find out whether the affect is real of psychological) and real drugs. The doctor is also blind so that they are not biased in their recordings.

If the drug passes all of these tests it is then approved.

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Thalidomide:

A drug that was initially developed to help people sleep.
Went through appropriate testing as a sleeping pill and was approved.
It was found it can also treat morning sickness for pregnant women.
The drug wasn't tested on pregnant women, meaning that the pregnant women who took thalidomide to relieve morning sickness later ended up having deformed children affected by the drug.
The drug was then banned after the side affects on pregnant women were discovered, but it was too late as many children were still born with deformed limbs.
Since it was banned, the drug has been found to be useful in treating leprosy and a few other diseases.

	Created by Isobel Lugg about 8 years ago

Note on AQA GCSE B1 notes, created by Isobel Lugg on 09/04/2016.