• Question: How does medicine effect your body?

    Asked by anon-251653 on 23 Apr 2020. This question was also asked by anon-251613.
    • Photo: Sophie Arthur

      Sophie Arthur answered on 23 Apr 2020:

      Wow – what a question!
      Well there are many different types of medicines that will affect your body in different ways. There are obviously drugs and vaccine types of medicines, there are cell based treatments for things, as well as physio type treatments too.

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 23 Apr 2020: last edited 23 Apr 2020 10:49 am

      Medicines work by grabbing hold of the proteins in your body that cause the pain / illness. Then, they try to deactivate those proteins to stop the pain.

      I am currently working on helping to design a medicine that can attack a protein that helps cancer cells multiply unstoppably!

    • Photo: Freya Harrison

      Freya Harrison answered on 23 Apr 2020: last edited 23 Apr 2020 11:19 am

      Sometimes medicines can affect our bodies in way that we might not expect at first. For instance, the medicines people take for hayfever (antihistamines) were developed because they affect the immune response that causes the horrible effects of hayfever. But they also make most people sleepy. This is not a great side effect if you just want to stop sneezing and get on with your day, but it was a great side effect for people who have trouble getting to sleep – the same kind of drugs are put into sleeping tablets.
      Other unexpected effects can just be bad. For example, there is an antibiotic called tobramycin which is used to treat very serious bacterial infections. Over time, it affects the patient’s hearing and it can make you deaf.
      The chance of side effects is why medicines need to go through lots of testing before they get approved for use. And why we are all encouraged to report any unusual side-effects of medicine through the Yellow Card Scheme (https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk)

    • Photo: Philip Denniff

      Philip Denniff answered on 23 Apr 2020:

      Wow! That’s a big topic. Like with any big task, lets try and break it down into some smaller more manageable bits. Different medicines are designed to cure different conditions, so if you have a headache you don’t need a medicine that will treat a verruca on your foot. Different head ache medicines interrupt the way you feel pain. Its quite a long chain of process that pass the pain from one link in the chain to the next. Different drugs break that chain at different places and provided the chain in broken the head ache goes away. Where as a verruca is caused by a virus that infects the skin. Most treatments rely on killing of the skin cells around the verruca so it cannot grow anymore and dies. That was just two medicines. Can you guess how cancer drugs might work or how pee tablets work and which part of the body do heart pills affect?

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