When you take a medicine for headache or body pain, does it actually travel to your head or the part of the body going through pain?
We all tend to pop a pill when we have some pain or ailment or discomfort in any part of the body. But have you ever stopped and thought, how does a tiny pill understand which part of your body is going through discomfort or pain and which part needs to be treated? Well, most of us may not have even thought in this direction.
Usually, we take medicines orally. Only sometimes, in case of severe conditions, that the medicines are injected in us or sometimes applied directly to the affected area. In all other situations, for every pain or body condition we just take the medicine orally with water.
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So, after all, how do medicines know which particular part of the body they have to go to. Shedding light on this process, a pharmaceutical scientist said what happens after all once a medicine enters the human body. When you take aspirin for a headache, how does the aspirin know to travel to your head and alleviate the pain?
Tom Anchordoquy, Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, told in his article in Conversations that other types of components in drugs are designed and developed to make the drug more effective in a specific part of the body. To understand this, it is important to understand how medicines work in the body.
How do drugs know where to go in the body?
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When you take a medicine for headache or body pain, does it actually travel to your head or the part of the body going through pain? Well the clear answer is no. However, special chemicals are added to the medicines to ensure that they show more effect in one particular part of the body and less in the rest.
In fact, medicines contain many other inactive ingredients or molecules in addition to the active drug for the affected areas. They also contain these inactive ingredients, which are added to strengthen the stability, drug absorption, colour, taste, and other properties so that the drug can work effectively.
For example, Asprin, a well-known drug used for headache, also contains substances that do not break down during transportation, while such medicines tend to dissolve as soon as they are taken in the mouth. Drug molecules affect the body by binding to different receptors on cells that can trigger a particular response.
How medicines behave once inside the body?
Medicines taken by mouth like pills, tablets, capsules, caplets, powders, or liquids are first swallowed with water. This then travels through the esophagus to the stomach. Once in the stomach, a medicine is dissolved in acid then flushed into the small intestine.
Medicine taken for diarrhea or constipation seek out their target receptor right there in the hollow gut, but other medicines travel across the gut and into the bloodstream before seeking out their target receptors. Some drugs, such as iron, get pumped through the gut wall, but most drugs just casually cross the gut wall into the bloodstream.
Some drugs such as blood thinners have their target receptor in the blood itself. Most others ride a carrier molecule to another part of the body such as brain or liver. Once there, the drug jumps off the carrier and moves into the target organ. When the drug molecule finally reaches the target receptor, it attaches, and only then becomes able to perform the desired function.
Ways a drug can produce an effect
For pain medicine, the pain signal gets shut off in the nerve. For reflux medicine, the acid secretion is halted in the stomach. For antidepressants, the chemistry in the brain gets adjusted and the depression improves. For antibiotics, the bacteria gets killed. There are many ways a drug can produce an effect, but it first needs to latch onto the target receptor.
Although drugs are designed with specific receptors in mind to produce desirable results, it is not possible to prevent them from travelling through the bloodstream to other parts of the body. For this reason, we get to see the side effects of the medicine due to their going to non-essential places.
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