How The Medicament Does Its Job

How you take a medicament can affect how well it works and how safe it will be for you. Sometimes it can be almost as important as what you take. Timing, what you eat and when you eat, proper dosage, and many other factors can mean the difference between feeling better, staying the same, or even feeling worse.

Pharmacokinetics concerns the movement of a medicament within your body. Under typical conditions, once you swallow a medication, it travels through your digestive tract to your small intestine, where it is absorbed into your bloodstream. It is then carried to your liver where, in many cases, it is broken down into a form that can be better used by your body. The medicament (or the product that has been broken down from the medicament) circulates throughout your system in order to achieve its desired effects, and then, as with most medicaments, is rapidly eliminated by your kidneys.

Your age, sex, size, diet, and existing health problems may all have an effect on how this process works.

Recommended doses of a particular medicament are based on premarket clinical testing evaluating the medicament's effectiveness in a few thousand people. Until recently, most medications were tested in young or middle-aged males. The scientific community, recognizing the differences of medicaments' effects between the sexes and between various age groups, has now added some older persons and some women in studies.

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