Portal:Pharmacy and Pharmacology/Intro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pharmacy (from the Greek φάρμακον = drug) is a transitional field between health sciences and chemical sciences and a profession charged with ensuring the safe use of medication. Traditionally, pharmacists have compounded and dispensed medications based on prescriptions from physicians. More recently, pharmacy has come to include other services related to patient care including clinical practice, medication review, and drug information. Some of these new pharmaceutical roles are now mandated by law in various legislatures. Pharmacists, therefore, are drug therapy experts, and the primary health professionals who optimise medication management to produce positive health-outcomes.
Pharmacology (in Greek: pharmacon (φάρμακον) meaning drug, and logos (λόγος) meaning science) is the study of how substances interact with living organisms to produce a change in function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals. The field encompasses drug composition and properties, interactions, toxicology, therapies, medical applications, and antipathogenic capabilities.
The field of pharmacy can generally be divided into three main disciplines:
- Pharmaceutics and industrial pharmacy which concerns on how to convert medication and drugs to suitable drug dosage forms.
- Pharmaceutical Sciences: including pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmacognosy, phytochemistry and also pharmacology.
- Pharmacy practice: which concerns over dispensing medication correctly. Recently this field has developed into hospital pharmacy and clinical pharmacy, all these field are concentrated on optimizing patient care.
Inside every branch of pharmacy there are many specialized branches related to many scientific disciplines. This makes pharmaceuticals related to the majority of pure and applied sciences. for example, medicinal chemistry can be divided into: ADME, bioavailability, chemogenomics, drug design, drug discovery, enzyme inhibition, mechanism of action, new chemical entity, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, pharmacology , pharmacophore perception, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship, and Structure-Activity Relationship.
Many other sciences are also related to many branches of pharmacy: we can mention physical chemistry including mixing and mass transfer which makes basis for pharmaceutics. The quality control process which is so necessary after the pharmaceutical production depends essentially on analytical chemistry.
Biology (including molecular biology and biochemistry), physiology, organic chemistry, microbiology, parasitology , and also botany are all related in some way with one of pharmacy sciences. Recently the field of drug discovery and drug design has developed with the new technologies invented in other fields like bioinformatics, cheminformatics, computational chemistry, genetics, and proteomics.
