What drugs do, and what they do that you did not want.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Selection of Essential Drugs: Report of a WHO Expert Committee
World Health Organization · 1977
Introduces the concept of a limited national list of essential medicines chosen for proven efficacy, safety and comparative cost, arguing that most…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Interaction of Citrus Juices with Felodipine and Nifedipine
David G. Bailey, J. David Spence, Camille Munoz & J. Malcolm O. Arnold · 1991
Reports that grapefruit juice, included only to mask a drug's taste in a control condition, itself roughly doubled blood levels of two…
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Mode of Action of Drugs on Cells
Alfred Joseph Clark · 1933
Argues that a drug's effect is a quantifiable function of the fraction of cell-surface receptors it occupies, founding receptor theory as the…
+6 more at this level
11 works
World Health Organization
Introduces the concept of a limited national list of essential medicines chosen for proven efficacy, safety and comparative cost, arguing that most health systems could meet the great majority of their populations' needs with a few hundred well-chosen drugs rather than the tens of thousands on the market.
link checked 17 Sept 2026T. P. G. M. de Vries, R. H. Henning, H. V. Hogerzeil & D. A. Fresle
Teaches prescribing as an explicit process — define the problem, specify the objective, choose a verified drug, write the prescription, give information, monitor — meant to replace habit with a checkable method.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Council for Harmonisation
Sets out an internationally harmonised structure for clinical drug development running from exploratory through confirmatory trials that regulators now expect any new drug application to follow.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David G. Bailey, J. David Spence, Camille Munoz & J. Malcolm O. Arnold
Reports that grapefruit juice, included only to mask a drug's taste in a control condition, itself roughly doubled blood levels of two calcium-channel blockers, revealing that ordinary food can inhibit drug-metabolising enzymes as powerfully as a co-prescribed medicine.
Alfred Joseph Clark
Argues that a drug's effect is a quantifiable function of the fraction of cell-surface receptors it occupies, founding receptor theory as the mechanistic basis of pharmacodynamics.
Sam Peltzman
Argues that requiring proof of efficacy before drug approval reduced the rate of new drug introduction by more than it improved the safety of the drugs that reached market, a conclusion still cited on both sides of arguments over regulatory stringency.
John G. Wagner
Argues that a drug's dose and dosing interval should be derived mathematically from its absorption, distribution and elimination rates rather than fixed by convention, founding clinical pharmacokinetics as a quantitative discipline.
Jason Lazarou, Bruce H. Pomeranz & Paul N. Corey
Pools American hospital studies to estimate serious adverse drug reactions occur in about seven percent of admissions and rank among the leading causes of death, treating properly prescribed medication itself as a major source of harm.
Ian A. Scott et al.
Proposes a systematic five-step process for identifying and safely withdrawing medicines whose risks now outweigh their benefit in patients on multiple drugs, treating deprescribing as a structured clinical skill rather than an afterthought.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joseph A. DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski & Ronald W. Hansen
Estimates bringing a new drug to market costs over two and a half billion dollars once failed candidates and the cost of capital are counted, a figure central to arguments over whether high drug prices are justified by development risk.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard M. Weinshilboum & Liewei Wang
Argues inherited variation in drug-metabolising genes explains much of the variation between patients in drug response and toxicity, and that genotyping ahead of a first prescription would prevent many adverse reactions.
link checked 17 Sept 2026