As you probably know, a big part of medicine is the use of drugs, which we also call medications. There are now medications to help with pretty much everything. To give you an idea of just how important they are, consider that the NHS spends over £17 billion a year on medications.
Now, we can roughly split these medications into two different groups, those that relieve the symptoms of our illnesses, and those that actually help us to treat the disease. Let's imagine you had a sore throat. The symptoms might be things like lots of coughing, pain in your throat, and a headache.
To help with this, you could take painkillers. So you maybe take some aspirin or some paracetamol, and these would probably reduce the pain, and also maybe ease your headache. You might also take things like cough medicine, which can reduce your need to cough.
The good thing about these drugs is that they're going to relieve the symptoms of your sore throat. but they don't actually help cure the problem at all, because whatever pathogens are in your throat causing the damage will still be there. However if you were to take something like antibiotics, then that might actually cure your sore throat, because antibiotics can directly kill bacteria, or at least prevent the growth of any new bacteria.
This would of course only work though if it was bacteria that was causing your sore throat. In reality, most sore throats are caused by viruses, and so antibiotics wouldn't do anything. There are two big reasons that antibiotics don't work on viruses. One is that antibiotics are made specifically to interfere with bacteria, and as viruses are so different to bacteria, the antibiotic can't do anything to them.
It's kind of like trying to kill a tree with a flyswatter. It just doesn't make any sense. The second reason is that even if antibiotics could kill viruses, which they can't, they wouldn't be able to find them, because viruses hide within our body's cells, which makes it almost impossible to destroy them without destroying our own cells as well. Now, the next bit of bad news is even if your sore throat was caused by bacteria, you still need to be careful, because there are loads of different antibiotics, and each antibiotic can only kill certain types of bacteria. So doctors might sometimes have to do a test first to find out which type of bacteria you have before they can prescribe an antibiotic.
A bigger problem with antibiotics is antibiotic resistance. We'll cover this in another video, but as it says in the name, it's basically where bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, which means that we can't use the same antibiotics to treat those bacteria anymore. So to sum up, basically what we're trying to say is that is that our ability to treat both the symptoms of a disease and the disease itself has revolutionised medicine, both in terms of improving people's quality of life and extending their lives. Loads of people are now being treated with multiple drugs at once, with some of them making them feel better, while other drugs help to fix the root causes of their diseases.
Anyway, that's everything that we wanted to cover for this video, so we hope you enjoyed it! And we'll see you next time.