First Aid for
Pharmacology
The pharmaceutical industry keeps expanding, adding new medicines to the thousands of drugs already available to treat everything from infectious diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis to cardiovascular illnesses, asthma, diabetes, mental illness and cancer. The process of drug discovery continues to evolve. In the past, it could take decades to develop new medications. New technologies and better screening methods now allow screening of thousands of candidate drugs in a few hours. In light of these new methodologies, why and how can it take so long to go from a promising research finding to prescription ($800m)? This new course will be a forum with which we will attempt to reconcile the basic research underlying drug discovery with its clinical and regulatory aspects. Our goal is to help students gain a better understanding of key fundamental questions surrounding drugs and drug discovery. At the same time, we hope to impart practical knowledge enabling the student to understand how drugs act on the body, why this works – and why it doesn’t. The course will include:
Cardiology
Neurology
Psychiatry
Diabetes / Endocrinology
Oncology
Infectious Diseases
Immunology
We will expand upon a basic knowledge of drugs and disease with assigned readings and discussions focused around:
- How do some of the most popular medicines work in the body? What are the side effects of these drugs and how can they interact with each other? Why are some combinations harmful and some benign or beneficial?
- Alternative medicines: Miracle drugs or quackery?
- Advertising drugs directly to the patient: Public service broadcast or marketing hype? Do we need doctors anymore?
- Medical information: How to uncover the truth. We will teach how to critically read science and medical articles, paying particular attention to exactly how to evaluate scientific claims, and where to go to answer questions these articles might raise.
- Who to trust: where does impartial medical advice come from?
- From bench to bedside: Following drug discovery through research, regulation, and release.
- What to do when drugs fail? Emergency training for asthma and heart attacks, drug overdose, critical allergic reactions, falls, etc.
The primary aim of this course is to remove some of the mystery surrounding drugs and drug development. The other main aim is to give a survival guide to living in the new age where every single American is taking more than one prescription medication/month (stats about elderly!). We hope to accomplish this by explaining the process of drug development from research to pharmacy shelf, integrating basic pharmacological and clincal principles with an eye towards popular science.
