Pharmacology

What’s the one thing you learned from The Lion King? No, not that blood lines are legit, or that power isn’t corrupting at all. The circle of life: everything is connected, affecting everything else.

Same goes for your body. You throw out your back and you scream. You go for a run and get high on endorphins. You take a pill and you experience side effects.

That last one is one of the many things under the umbrella of pharmacology. Pharmacology is the study of the circle of life in the body, asking, "What happens when we throw this drug into the mix?" Pharmacologists try to find drugs to do certain things: cure cancer, grow hair on your bald spot, get rid of that allergy or that headache. That’s why drugs that have uses are called pharmaceuticals. #pharmalife. But remember: circle of life.

There are two main branches of pharmacology. Pharmacodynamics studies the effects of drugs on biological systems. Will x drug help y problem? The other branch is pharmacokinetics, which studies the effects of biological systems on drugs. Well, yes, x drug will help y problem...but the body responds to the drug with hair loss, arthritis, and bone deterioration, so...that’s awkward.

You need both branches of pharmacology to get a drug approved. To get that to happen, you’ll need funding. And where does funding come from? People who want to make money with their money. They make a new drug, get it approved, and patent it so there’s no market competition for a while. Unless you’re the Jonas Salk type. He chose not to patent the polio vaccine, giving the recipe to the public. Nice guy.