Pharmacotherapy
Pharmacotherapy is the treatment of disease with medications. It involves choosing drugs, determining doses, and monitoring benefits and harms.
Pharmacodynamics: The study of how drugs affect organisms, including their targets, effects, and dose-response relationships. It explains how a chosen medication produces therapeutic and harmful effects.
Antimicrobial therapy: Treatment of infections with medicines that kill or inhibit microorganisms. It applies pharmacotherapy to infections while accounting for the causative organism.
Drug: A chemical substance used to diagnose, prevent, or treat disease, or to alter physiological function. Pharmacotherapy uses drugs as its direct means of treatment.
Non-pharmacological treatment: Treatment that manages disease without medicines, such as surgery, exercise, or behavioral therapy. It offers a non-drug option that may replace or complement medication.
Antimicrobial resistance: The ability of microorganisms to survive or grow despite exposure to medicines that once inhibited them. Inappropriate antimicrobial use can accelerate resistance and reduce future treatment options.
Pharmacokinetics: The study of how the body absorbs, distributes, metabolizes, and eliminates drugs. These processes determine drug concentrations over time and inform dosing.
Chemotherapy: Treatment of cancer or other diseases with drugs that damage or inhibit cells. Cancer treatment illustrates how drug regimens target disease while affecting healthy tissue.
Dose: The measured amount of a medicine administered at one time or over a specified period. Dose is a central decision in balancing therapeutic benefit and toxicity.
Watchful waiting: A strategy of monitoring a condition without immediate treatment, with intervention if it changes. It contrasts active medication with a deliberate decision to monitor first.
Medication error: A preventable mistake in prescribing, dispensing, administering, or monitoring a medicine. Errors can cause avoidable harm at any stage of medication treatment.