Medication and Pharmacology Terms

Longer courses are wound down in steps rather than stopped outright, because the body pauses its own cortisol production.

Designed around the shape of a calming brain chemical, yet it works nowhere near that chemical's receptors.

The trigger shot of fertility treatment: an injected pregnancy hormone borrowed because it fits the receptor that normally releases an egg.

Part instruction and part legal document, a prescription records exactly what was ordered and by whom, and stays in the record long afterward.

The active ingredient in a drug that is used to treat advanced Hodgkin lymphoma and is being studied in the treatment of other types of cancer.

Blocking dopamine in the brainstem area that triggers vomiting also explains the stiffness and restlessness this drug can cause.

A recombinant, chimeric, dual-receptor agonist fusion protein with immunohematopoietic activity.

A manufactured hormone built to act like progesterone, and the second ingredient in almost every contraceptive pill.

Unlike a bisphosphonate, denosumab leaves the skeleton once dosing stops, and bone loss resumes quickly when it does.

A drug given during chemotherapy to increase blood cell regeneration.

An old antihistamine kept in use less for allergy than for the two side effects it produces reliably: sleepiness and the settling of nausea.

Speed is the whole point: it takes effect within a breath or two and lets go just as fast, and it provides no pain relief.

A drug that is used to treat impotence (inability to have an erection) and is being studied in the treatment of sexual problems in men who have had surgery for prostate cancer.

A substance used to detect prostate cancer.

Cells that manufacture antibody by the ton depend most on clearing protein waste, which is why myeloma is unusually sensitive to the block.

A drug used to treat breast cancer that has spread or that has come back within 6 months after chemotherapy.

The ointment form of tacrolimus, valued in eczema mainly because it spares the skin from the thinning that steroids cause.

A treatment manufactured one patient at a time, which is why it is called a vaccine even though it treats rather than prevents.

A quick-relief inhaler brand whose active drug reopens narrowed airways within minutes but does nothing to the inflammation beneath.

Wakefulness is treated and the cause is not, which is why the drug sits alongside airway treatment rather than replacing it.