In response to my previous post, here’s an explainer about medications.
Medications, or medicines, are generally the things your doctor has prescribed for you. This is the stuff we want to know about when you arrive at the hospital and ask you what drugs you’re taking. Non-prescribed medications are the recreational ones, the ones people think of when you say drugs: tobacco, weed, meth, P, LSD, E, etc ; as well as the over the counter “dietary supplements” that people pay huge amounts of money for, with the only result being getting poorer, and having very expensive urine. (Q: What do you call alternative medicines that are proven to work? A: Medicine.)
Prescribed medications come in many forms: the ones we’re most familiar with are the ones you take orally: pills – either tablets
or capsules
or liquids – syrups or elixirs.
But medications also include inhalers, nebulizers, nasal sprays, eye drops, ear drops, patches or other topical delivery methods like creams or ointments, and then stuff delivered via the rectum or vagina. All of these latter categories are often forgotten when people are reporting the medications they’re on.
I remember one high point of my early medical career, when I was a house surgeon in a medical ward, and we saw an asthmatic patient on our ward round. Her asthma was improving with our treatments, but she had a red and painful eye which was new. “Oh!” I said “It’s probably acute glaucoma brought on by the ipratropium or the salbutamol in the nebulizer, that has caused her pupils to dilate”. I was right, and she went off to have surgery on her eye later that day, which saved her from going blind in that eye. My consultant was terrifically impressed, and gave me a very good report at the end of my run, even though he privately told me he thought general practice was where my future lay. It was only by chance that I had done an ophthalmology run just the month prior, so that information was right on the top of my head. The other valuable lesson I learnt on that run was how to spell “Ophthalmology”, no mean feat in the days before spell check.