Reducing Complexity

The desire to simplify clinical situations and variables is one of the important reasons that physicians often prefer highly refined and regulated prescription medication preparations, as opposed to less refined and regulated products, often marketed as "natural" (to imply safety).

Products from nature are essentially always complex mixtures of large numbers of different chemical agents, many only partially understood in term of usual desirable and undesirable responses, relationships of these effects to specific doses and with varying amounts of dose present within any given sample available.

The pharmaceutical industry highly purifies, concentrates and sometimes makes very controlled modifications of agents obtained from natural sources (there is no alternative source) so as to select out and greatly reduce the variables in the treatment agent offered. Ratios of relative responses, often summarized using the concept therapeutic index, are utilized to help understand and communicate treatment responses.

A pharmaceutical grade agent does not make the patient any more simple but it does greatly simplify, narrow and make more definable and predictable both the usual desirable and undesirable effects of the treatment agent, based on careful tracking of the responses of many individuals who have taken the agent, in widely varying amounts and situations, in the past. This purification can greatly improve the probability for both the patient and the physician that the resulting responses to the treatment are likely to be more predictable and controllable.

What is Therapy?

Therapy (in Greek: θεραπεία), or treatment, is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis. In the medical field, it is synonymous with the word "treatment".

In addition to (or in place of) the intended therapeutic effect of a treatment, a therapist may cause undesired (adverse) effects as well. When an adverse effect is weaker than the therapeutic effect, it is commonly referred to as a "side effect". An adverse effect may result from an unsuitable or incorrect dosage or procedure (which could be due to medical error). Some adverse effects occur only when starting, increasing or discontinuing a treatment. Using a drug or other medical intervention which is contraindicated may increase the risk of adverse effects. Patients sometimes quit a therapy because of its adverse effects. The severity of adverse effects ranges from nausea to death. Common adverse effects include alteration in body weight, change in enzyme levels, loss of function, or pathological change detected at the microscopic, macroscopic or physiological level.

Adverse effects may cause a reversible or irreversible change, including an increase or decrease in the susceptibility of the individual to other chemicals, foods, or procedures (e.g. drug interaction).

Therapeutic effect

A therapeutic effect is a consequence of a medical treatment, of any kind, the results of which are judged to be desirable and beneficial. This is true whether the result was expected, unexpected, or even an unintended consequence of the treatment.

What constitutes a therapeutic effect vs. a side effect is a matter of both the nature of the situation in which a treatment is used and the goals of treatment.

There is no inherent difference between therapeutic and undesired side effects; both responses are behavioral/physiologic changes which occur as a response to the treatment strategy or agent. However, those changes which are viewed as desirable, given the situation, are called therapeutic; those undesirable for the situation are viewed as unfavorabe.

Difference between preventions, treatments, and cures

A prevention or preventive measure is a way to avoid an injury, sickness, or disease in the first place, and generally it will not help someone who is already ill (though there are exceptions). For instance, many babies in developed countries are given a polio vaccination soon after they are born, which prevents them from contracting polio. But the vaccination does not work on patients who already have polio. A treatment or cure is applied after a medical problem has already started.

A treatment treats a problem, and may lead to its cure, but treatments more often ameliorate a problem only for as long as the treatment is continued. For example, there is no cure for AIDS, but treatments are available to slow down the harm done by HIV and delay the fatality of the disease. Treatments don't always work. For example, chemotherapy is a treatment for some types of some cancers, which may in some cases enact a cure, but not in all cases for all cancers.

Cures are a subset of treatments that reverse illnesses completely or end medical problems permanently.