What a Pharmacologist can Mean for You
The health care industry comes with a slew of indecipherable names and words that ordinary individuals like you or me would never otherwise know if our classes did not force us to. Pharmacology is one such word that many of us would not otherwise be aware of, although it has become increasingly vital for many of us to know the benefits that pharmacologists serve in our society. Pharmacology is the study of drug action, differing greatly from the role that pharmacists fill; pharmacologists instead test the interactions that occur between living organisms and various chemicals, many times discovering a new biological drug that can help combat viruses.
Without pharmacology, we would not be able to safely take any drugs, vaccines, or prescriptions because they would not be safely tested, nor would we know what we were putting in our bodies. While pharmacists develop new drugs, pharmacologists ensure that these drugs will help us fight diseases without causing further harm to our bodies. Surprisingly, pharmacologists existed as far back as the Middle Ages, although they experienced a kind of “dark ages” themselves after this point until the nineteenth century. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that we realized many drugs that doctors give us, need to be further researched before human ingestion.
As a result, pharmacologists were again brought back to test the chemical reactions between various substances and observe the reactions of living organisms to these chemical compounds. A field that was once empty opened up nearly overnight, and served to secure the health care industry in an uncertain era. Since this point, pharmacologists have expanded their studies and help discover new compounds that can be mixed in order to fight more diseases than ever before. This is especially helpful in the modern era, in which viruses seem to emerge nearly overnight. Pharmacologists were involved in discovering an antidote for the H1N1 virus that swept the world within a few weeks, causing mass hysteria in many overcrowded cities. Pharmacologists helped calm this fear by introducing a tentative vaccine relatively early on, and later developed a full fledged vaccine by the time flu season really took off.
While this was the first outbreak to occur in the past few years, it does not mean that we are safe from future diseases. Pharmacologists have a larger role to play in our future in which we will grow ever closer to foreign nations. While this closeness is a good thing for global politics, it means that it will be easier than ever to spread disease and viruses, although we will continue to be protected by the skill of pharmacologists. Pharmacology means that we sleep better at night knowing there are individuals who fight viruses for us to ensure we won’t succumb to a simple flu compound.
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This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
