Drugs!!

Not the dodgy kind you can buy!!

A drug is designed to either prevent or cause something to happen in your body.

Every cell of your body has RECEPTORS on its surface. These RECEPTORS receive chemicals that transmit a message to the cell.

Your body is full of chemicals, in fact, it is jam-packed with them. Your cells are constantly receiving chemical messengers.

Sometimes, you don't want the message to get there or you want a different message to be received instead - this is where DRUGS come in to it.

A drug is technically a chemical that intervenes and changes things.

A drug may help your body deliver more of the same message to a cell or it can lodge itself in a cell receptor to stop the message being received by the cell.

Random fact: the Greek doctor Hippocrates used willow bark as long ago as 400BC to relieve the pain of his patients.

Wounds can become infected with harmful bacteria if an antiseptic is not applied to kill them. Antiseptics are able to kill bacteria in many ways. The alcohol rubbed onto your skin before an injection kills bacteria by breaking up the protein that makes up their cells.

There are 2 main ways in which antibiotics work. One type prevents the bacteria from making its cell walls. Another type interferes with the chemical activities in the cells of bacteria.

Anaesthetic drugs are designed to stop the brain from receiving messages of pain.

Antiviral drugs work by blocking the chemicals the virus needs to reproduce.

Drugs go vigorous testing that can span 8 years.