Ten Drugs by Thomas Hager

Author:Thomas Hager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

In the ten years after it first reached the market, CPZ was taken by fifty million patients. But today it’s hardly used at all.

It’s been superseded by new formulations that have taken over the market, an evolution fueled by CPZ’s negative side. The more the older drug was used in the 1950s and 1960s, the more patients started turning up with strange side effects. There was the “purple people” issue, when the skin of high-dose patients turned a strange sort of violet-gray. Others got rashes or developed sun sensitivity. In some, blood pressure would drop precipitously. Others developed jaundice or blurred vision.

These were relatively minor. Side effects were expected with any new drug, and most of CPZ’s could be fixed with proper dosing. But then came something more troubling. Physicians around the world found that some of their long-term patients, maybe one in seven, again mostly those on higher doses, were getting twitchy, their tongues poking out uncontrollably, lips smacking, hands shaking, faces twisted into grimaces. They couldn’t seem to stop moving, shifting from foot to foot, rocking in place. They walked with a jerky gait. It looked to some physicians like symptoms of encephalitis or Parkinson’s disease. The condition, named tardive dyskinesia, was very serious. Even when the doctors lowered their doses, the symptoms could persist for weeks or months. In some patients they didn’t go away even when the drug was stopped entirely.

So major drug companies searched for the next big antipsychotic, something that could do what CPZ did, but with added benefits and fewer side effects. There were twenty on the market by 1972. But none of this first wave was more than marginally better than the drug used by Laborit and Delay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.