Pharmacology Related Quotes

One day in my pharmacology class, we were discussing the possibility of legalizing marijuana. The class was pretty evenly divided between those that advocated legalizing marijuana and those that did not. The professor said he wanted to hear from a few people on both sides of the argument. A couple students had the opportunity to stand in front of the class and present their arguments. One student got up and spoke about how any kind of marijuana use was morally wrong and how nobody in the class could give him any example of someone who needed marijuana. A small girl in the back of the classroom raised her hand and said that she didn’t want to get up, but just wanted to comment that there are SOME situations in which people might need marijuana. The same boy from before spoke up and said that she needed to back up her statements and that he still stood by the fact that there wasn’t anyone who truly needed marijuana. The same girl in the back of the classroom slowly stood up. As she raised her head to look at the boy, I could physically see her calling on every drop of confidence in her body. She told us that her husband had cancer. She started to tear up, as she related how he couldn’t take any of the painkillers to deal with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments. His body was allergic and would have violent reactions to them. She told us how he had finally given in and tried marijuana. Not only did it help him to feel better, but it allowed him to have enough of an appetite to get the nutrients he so desperately needed. She started to sob as she told us that for the past month she had to meet with drug dealers to buy her husband the only medicine that would take the pain away. She struggled every day because according to society, she was a criminal, but she was willing to do anything she could to help her sick husband. Sobbing uncontrollably now, she ran out of the classroom. The whole classroom sat there in silence for a few minutes. Eventually, my professor asked, “Is there anyone that thinks this girl is doing something wrong?” Not one person raised their hand.

Calorie restriction is the only non-pharmacological method of consistently extending life span and protecting against many age-related diseases.

Opiates are compounds derived from opium and include morphine, codeine, and a variety of related alkaloids. The term opioid is broader and includes all compounds (alkaloids or peptides) that have affinity for opioid receptors.

Type A reactions are dose dependent, common, and related to the pharmacological effects of the drug. Type B reactions are allergic or idiosyncratic reactions; they are not dose dependent and are usually not predictable or preventable. Type C reactions are related to the cumulative dose of the medication; they are dose and time related, and they are relatively uncommon.

Beginning in the early 1980s, various researchers, including myself, showed that this “glucocorticoid neurotoxicity” was not just a pharmacological effect, but was relevant to normal brain aging in the rat. Collectively, the studies showed that lots of glucocorticoid exposure (in the range seen during stress) or lots of stress itself would accelerate the degeneration of the aging hippocampus. Conversely, diminishing glucocorticoid levels (by removing the adrenals of the rat) would delay hippocampal aging. And as one might expect by now, the extent of glucocorticoid exposure over the rat’s lifetime not only determined how much hippocampal degeneration there would be in old age, but how much memory loss as well.

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.

Despite the advancements of systematic experimental pipelines, literature-curated protein-interaction data continue to be the primary data for investigation of focused biological mechanisms. Notwithstanding the variable quality of curated interactions available in public databases, the impact of inspection bias on the ability of literature maps to provide insightful information remains equivocal. The problems posed by inspection bias extend beyond mapping of protein interactions to the development of pharmacological agents and other aspects of modern biomedicine. Essentially the same 10% of the proteome is being investigated today as was being investigated before the announcement of completion of the reference genome sequence. One way forward, at least with regard to interactome mapping, is to continue the transition toward systematic and relatively unbiased experimental interactome mapping. With continued advancement of systematic protein-interaction mapping efforts, the expectation is that interactome 'deserts', the zones of the interactome space where biomedical knowledge researchers simply do not look for interactions owing to the lack of prior knowledge, might eventually become more populated. Efforts at mapping protein interactions will continue to be instrumental for furthering biomedical research.

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. Unfortunately, this leads many people to dismiss the project out of hand: They look inside, notice nothing of interest, and conclude that introspection is a dead end. But just imagine where astronomy would be if, centuries after Galileo, a person were still obliged to build his own telescope before he could even judge whether astronomy was a legitimate field of inquiry. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but astronomy’s development as a science would become immensely more difficult. A few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and I discuss some of them in a later chapter—but generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter; many of them can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy after merely thinking about them. But to determine whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—and to see how these states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work. Unfortunately, it is not work that the Western intellectual tradition knows much about. LOST

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.19 People are not dying because of opioids; they are dying because of ignorance.

critical thinking Scenario 1 Mrs. Hernandez is an 85-yearold female admitted to surgery for insertion of a hip prosthesis to treat a hip fracture. The surgical technologist assigned to transport the patient to the preoperative holding area performed a routine review of the patient’s medical chart in the emergency department. The medical chart indicates that Mrs. Hernandez is being treated forchronic hypertension. 1. Knowing that she has a concurrent diagnosis of hypertension, which additional related items should be checked on her chart? 2. How might this situation affect the preparations going on in the surgery department? 3. What action or actions should the surgical technologist take prior to bringing the patient to preoperative holding? Scenario 2 Mr. Van Nguyen is a 47-yearold male admitted to surgery for repair of a retinal detachment under general anesthesia. 1. Which diuretic may be administered intraoperatively? 2. The circulator should check the preference card for a standing order for what preoperative preparation of the patient specific to this situation? 124

...the criminalization of drugs was related not to the pharmacological or social harms engendered by drugs, but was a result of anti-Black and anti-Chinese sentiment.

Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Why would a person push down their feelings? Because they are too painful, they are too much to bear. In other words, the pushing down of feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you are not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments. So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you are diagnosed with depression. Now, as a medical, biological problem, they give you a pill. I'm not here to fight against pharmacology. I've taken anti-depressants and they've helped me. They work sometimes. But they are not the answer. Because the answer is how does that childhood experience manifest in your life today. If you understand all of these historical, cultural, familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you, certain self-view, certain patterns of emotional relating, now you can do something about it. Now it is not longer "there is something wrong with me", it is just that "this is how I adapted to what happened to me." And therefore I have the capacity now, as a conscious human being, to become aware of all this and to transform myself. It's not so easy to transform yourself because, of course, these adaptions that I've talked about, originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way. And we don't know any other way of being, except there's something telling us that "this is not right." Something is telling us. So we can see individual problems like depression or ADHD or multiple sclerosis or anything else as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we are out of sync with our true nature, that we are misaligned somehow with actually who we are. And that something in us is trying to wake us up.

Nobody in a position of real power and influence in government has the courage to say, publicly: "We made a mistake. Certain drugs which are now illegal can be used by healthy adults with relative safety and no threat of addiction, but you have to know what their effects are and how to use them properly. These include most psychedelics. Other drugs can be used safely by most people, but could be habituating to a few. Those few must have access to good medical care if they get into trouble. Some drugs seem to be either harmful or addicting to most users, and we will de our best to inform you fully regarding their effects and track records, as we now do with prescription drugs. Drug education will be provided across the country and the teachers will no longer be police or politicians, but physicians, chemist and pharmacologist who specialize in this field.