“Will there be any side effects for these medications, doctor?” Most patients do not fail to raise this doubt at the end of the consultation. Though I assuage them with supportive words, my pharmacological memory would rattle out at least a dozen side effects for every drug that I had prescribed. Most of them would be subtle and unnoticeable while some of them could be difficult to handle. Like the pamphlet inside the drug box, if one must explain all ‘possible’ side effects of a drug, then it would be mentally prohibiting for patients.
Allopathic drugs are basically chemicals which act on chemical receptors at the cellular level, and interact with chemical processes in the human body to produce the desired outcome. For example, the commonly used paracetamol inhibits prostaglandin production in the hypothalamus (the temperature controlling centre of our body) to combat fever. However, it can interrupt prostaglandin production in other parts of the body also, causing side effects such as gastritis. Most such side effects are predictable and in optimal doses are not bothersome. Sometimes, another drug like an antacid is prescribed to counteract a common and predictable side effect. However, certain side effects can be serious and life threatening, and such ‘adverse effects’ need to be monitored for. For example, certain pain killers can injure the kidneys and should be prescribed with caution in elderly people.
However, this article is about the ‘positive’ side effects of certain drugs. Sometimes, drugs, which were originally developed for a particular disease, were serendipitously found to have some ‘beneficial’ side effects and they are now being prescribed for their side effects. The drug finasteride was developed for prostate enlargement causing urinary symptoms in elderly men. Over a period, patients and some shrewd doctors noticed that their scalp hair showed some positive-growth after ingesting finasteride. This encouraged pharmaceuticals to develop a scalp hair-fall solution with finasteride as the major ingredient and this became a runaway success for baldness treatment. Currently it is one of the most popular hair-fall solutions sold across the world.
However, the most exciting story is that of sildenafil. In the late 1990s, the Pfizer company was testing the efficacy of the new drug for treating cardiac angina. In animal studies, it demonstrated good efficacy without any adverse effects. Buoyed by this, the company initiated clinical trials in healthy volunteers to study its safety and side effect profile in humans. Again, sharp-minded, astute nurses, who were documenting the vital parameters of these healthy men, noted a peculiar observation: most men were lying on their stomach since they were shy of their unexpectedly raging manhood. Upon enquiry, the middle-aged men revealed that they had protracted and intense activity in their private organs. Pfizer capitalized on this observation and soon they marketed sildenafil as Viagra for impotence, much to the delight of millions of people across the world. The side effect of a drug became a successful positive effect, enabling the manufacturers to make one of the most commercially successful drugs in the history of mankind.
Side effects of modern medications are unavoidable but not sinister. But it is left to the shrewdness of a few people to observe and make benefits out of them. So, next time when you pop a pill, be on the lookout. Who knows you could be the next billionaire!
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