Pharmacological drugs and their sources

 

Pharmacological drugs and their sources

Hello friends ,

Today we are going to learn about some pharmacological drugs and their sources . First of all, at the beginning we will see the definition of drug according to theWHO--

" drug is any substance or product that is used or is intended to be used to modify or explore physiological systems or pathological States for the benefit of the recipient"

according to this definition,

we can see that the drug can be used for diagnosis, prevention, treatment or cure of disease. also it is used for some physiological modifications like the use of contraceptives to prevent pregnancy and the use of drugs which improve the health condition better than the initial

In the lifetime everybody, took some drugs for a disease or which may be for any other modifications in the lifestyle. Everyone has some questions or some curiosity about - 'from where these drugs are made??'

here I list some of sources from where we get the drugs first source is a plant

from the plants we get so many variety of medically helpful chemicals or substances which can be used as a drug . There are so many ancient systems of medicine which use different plants for their medicinal purposes .The ancient systems like ayurvedic, Chinese, Egyptian ,Greek put their a whole efforts in finding the medicinal uses of this plants. The drugs obtained from the plants for example--

sarpagandha -used for treatment of Cholera, fever,  hypertension ,insect bite and snake bite

opium - used to relieve the pain and for treatment of cough as antitussive

belladonna used to induce the sleep ,to stop the bronchospasm

curare- used as a skeletal muscle relaxant

Cinchona - used to increase the apetite

also used as antimalerial drug

Ephedra- used for the weight loss

artemisin - used as an drug of choice for treatement of

maleria

There is a long list of these drugs which are obtained from plants ,for categorisation of the drugs obtained from plants we will see some classification of the drugs according to their nature

1)alkaloids-

these are nothing but alkaline nitrogenous bases

these are mainly vegetable origin drugs

examples of alkaloids -

atropine -

morphine -

nicotine -

ergotamine -

recerpine -

2)glycosides-

these are nothing but compound which is made up of one sugar moiety which is joined with the heterocyclic non sugar moiety (which is also called as aglycon) with the help of ether linkage

among these glycoside well-known glycoside is a -cardiac glycoside like

Digoxin -

oubain -

aminoglycoside like gentamicin which have a major antibiotic property to kill the microorganisms - has the amino sugar in place of sugar moiety

3) oils-

among this class of oils we can see two subclasses like

fixed oils or non volatile oils and essential oils or volatile oils