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Helping the body reap the benefits of medications
We have plenty of prescription medications available to us but their efficiency is limited by, among other things, our body’s tendency to reject foreign entities
On any given day almost half the US population is on prescription medication according to a 2019 publication from the National Center for Health Statistics; still more take over the counter medications. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a person who has never taken any medication at all. It’s hardly surprising then that the revenue share of the North American pharmaceutical market last year was almost $590 billion (48.9% of the global, staggeringly large more than $1 trillion market).
Last year, the FDA approved a record number of new drugs (59; the 5-average is 43), of which 58% were orphan drugs — those that the developers are reluctant to pursue because of limited financial gains thanks to a very small number of people who will use them, such as in the cases of rare diseases.
Despite the availability of medicines (let’s put aside the issues surrounding accessibility, for now), it’s difficult finding a person who has never complained about the poor effectiveness of a medication they’ve taken. Why is this? Why is our “after-medicine” moment rarely like the one projected by people in the those medicine advertisements?
