I'm thinking of posting a question on my Facebook account, since it's something I've been kicking around for awhile while cooking this weekend. What is the best drug invention/discovery ever? Okay, I'm only talking about legitimate drugs, not recreational, but there's some seriously good ones. Things I wouldn't want to live without. Obviously, it will differ according to personal situation: diabetics would (probably) vote for insulin, HIV-patients for AZT or whatever they get prescribed nowadays.
My vote(s) are threefold.
1) Benadryl. There's just so much to like about it. Yeah, it can make you sleepy, but when you're about to scratch your own eyeballs out from hay fever, a little sleepiness doesn't seem so bad. Also, you can take it preventatively, like I do when I want to eat rosemary containing food, but don't want to break out in hives. Plus it's been a generic forever, so it's relatively cheap. And people can't make it into methamphetamine, so you don't have to sign for it & get put on a government list.
2) Cortisone. Maybe most people don't appreciate this one, but I saw a documentary on this African-American chemist (Percy Julian, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Lavon_Julian) that helped to find a really cheap way to produce cortisone, and they really emphasized the difference that it made to people with rheumatoid arthritis. Also how desperate people used to be to get it - when it was first produced, it was taken from an animal source & so was really rare & expensive; Julian found a way to modify soybean steroids to produce cortisone. I don't have RA, but I do have psoriasis, which is a corticosteroid-intensive kind of disorder. I love it. It's one of the only things that works consistently, and I have a relaxing reaction to its application that may be totally psychosomatic, but I don't care.
3) Novacaine (and all the other nerve-blocking, -caine class of drugs). I get a lot of dental work done, enough said. Also, I once had conjunctivitis so bad I couldn't actually open my eyes. They put lidocaine on my eyeballs in the ER, and the pain instantly disappeared. Granted, it's no cure for anything, but when you need local anesthesia, it's awesome (and has allowed me to get wisdom teeth pulled without general anesthesia, which I hate).
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4 comments:
Hmm - I think I'd say Claritin instead of Benadryl. It's a lot more expensive, but it's non-drowsy, comes in 12-hour and 24-hour versions, AND I don't get into this horrible depression from it. (One day, A and I both took Benadryl, and we both went through hours of this incredible, out-of-nowhere, scary depression. I actually called the company to report it.)
Other than that, IBUPROFEN!!!!
I think I would be torn between Asprin and Claritin or Allegra.
I don't deal well with allergies or headaches.
I'd say it's a toss up between aspirin, insulin, and the polio vaccine. However, pain killers and penicillin have to rank pretty high. I think that the exorbitant cost of so many of these drugs, especially new ones, would be drastically reduced if they would just stop the advertising to the general public who don't know what they're for and can't write scripts for them. Leave it to the doctors or pharmacists to inform people of their need and use!
I realize this is a sort of a silly personal question, and not a scientific inquiry, but how do you differentiate between legitimate and recreational? Many drugs are both, including benedryl. Just saying.
If we're talking historically, I'd have to go with penicillin, ether (first general anesthetic), and morphine.
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