• Question: What chemicals in medicine make you feel better?

    Asked by 392enqm32 to sakshisharda, Martin, Jennifer on 14 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Martin Lindley

      Martin Lindley answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      it all depends upon what medicine you take and what your symptoms are

      for instance pain medicine usually just blocks the receptors in your brain so that you do not feel the pain. It is actually still there but your brain does not register it .

      indigestion medicine actually changes the ph of your stomach so actually stops the acid build up and so takes away what is causing the pain

    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      There are lots and lots of different chemicals and they all work in different ways to make you feel better. As Martin says, they can change things by blocking certain pain pathways or changing a situation in your body that has gone wrong. The big downside to medicines is that they can have really bad side-effects – this is where the chemical can do something good like take pain away, but then can make you feel drowsy or upset your stomach.
      Chemotherapy treatments are notoriously bad for this. They are medicines that people take to try to stop the growth of cancer. They can be effective but they make the patients feel terrible and can be very unpleasant indeed. A lot of research is put into the design of medicines to reduce side effects , especially those used in cancer treatments.

Comments