Ask a Teacher

Search



How does the medicine react with our body?
Medicines act in a variety of ways. Some can cure an illness by killing or halting the spread of invading germs, such as bacteria and viruses. Others are used to treat cancer by killing cells as they divide or preventing them from multiplying. Some drugs simply replace missing substances or correct abnormally low levels of natural body chemicals such as certain hormones or vitamins. Medicines can even affect parts of the nervous system that control a particular body process.
Certain medicines are designed to relieve pain. If you pull a muscle, your doctor might tell you to take ibuprofen or acetaminophen. These pain relievers, or analgesics, don't get rid of the source of the pain — your muscle will still be pulled. What they do is block the pathways that transmit pain signals from the injured or irritated body part to the brain (in other words, they affect the way the brain reads the pain signal) so that you don't hurt as much while your body recovers.
Among the most important medicines are immunizations (or vaccines). These keep people from getting sick in the first place by immunizing, or protecting, the body against certain infectious diseases. Vaccines usually contain a small amount of an agent that resembles a specific germ or germs that have been modified or killed. When someone is vaccinated, it primes the body's immune system to "remember" the germ so it will be able to fight off infection by that germ in the future.
Antibiotics work:
Although there are a number of different types of antibiotic they all work in one of two ways:

    A bactericidal antibiotic kills the bacteria. Penicillin is a bactericidal. A bactericidal usually either interferes with the formation of the bacterium's cell wall or its cell contents. A bacteriostatic stops bacteria from multiplying.


comments powered by Disqus