9781422273869

This Is Your Brain (and the Rest of You) on Drugs

If you have a headache, you might take medication—perhaps aspirin, acetaminophen (Tylenol), or ibuprofen (Advil). These drugs are called analgesics (from the ancient Greek for “without pain”), and their main feature is that they reduce pain without causing any change in consciousness. But they can still have side effects. For example, some people don’t like taking ibuprofen because it upsets their stomachs. All drugs, whether legal or illegal, are going to have a variety of impacts on the body. Sometimes those impacts are subtle, and you might barely notice them. Caffeine is a drug, for instance, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to have a huge personality change any time you drink a soda with caffeine in it. Other impacts are extreme and hard to miss. For instance, chemotherapy treatments destroy cancer cells, but they can hurt healthy cells, too—that’s why people on chemotherapy regimens sometimes lose their hair.

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