Medical Side Effect

 When I think about this practice, my thoughts goes back to the first invasion of smallpox to the world. Many people believe that the survival of smallpox becomes immune to the sickness, so there was a practice  then called viriology.  The process of infecting people with the small pox virus and trying to cure it so they can stay immune to smallpox.  This practice left most of their survivals blind but a good number survived it until Edward Jenner discovered that victims infected with cowpox are naturally immune to smallpox which brought about the study and practice of immunology. 

Cowpox was not just a protection from smallpox, but was also communicable with the ability to transmit from one person to the other given it a wide protection from small pox, till it was announced that smallpox had been completely eradicated from the world. Irrespective of the fact that it prevented smallpox, it still leavse its victims with symptoms of fever, headache, malaise, vomiting etc. These effects (side effects) makes the individual sick, but it is not lether; leading us to the definition of side effect in medicine.

Side effect as the name implies is an effect, whether therapeutic or adverse, that is unintended: although the term is predominantly used to describe adverse effect, nevertheless it can apply to beneficial, but unintended, consequences of the use of drug.

Some effect especially psychoactive have cost a lot of people to abuse drugs like codeine and some sleeping pills like quaalude. The effect of some drugs are very adverse that it is written on the instruction manual that when experienced, one is expected to see a physician.

  As someone that writes on wholistic health, we are not even allowed to call our product drugs but medicine. If I try to distinguish between drug and medicine, it would spring up a whole new controversy that cannot be contained on a single blog post. Generally, we say our medicine has no side effect, but we really need to be sure of the allergies of some of the users because some of our medicines are made from bees extract, and fruits which could be allergic to some people. So we cannot completely rule out side effect, but as it is sacrosanct in drugs to always have side effect, tcm medicine believes their therapies are made from food, fruits and herbs which are natural and have little or no side effect. My advise to you, is to regularly check the label of any medicine or drugs you want to consume to know what it is made off and the possible side effect so you don't go from bad to worst.