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Therapeutics:
Therapeutics:
The science and techniques of restoring patients to health. Properly, therapeutics has many branches, any or all of which may be needed in the treatment of a specific patient. In addition to pharmacotherapeutics or drug therapy, there exist coordinate fields of therapeutics such as surgical therapy, psychotherapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, dietotherapy, etc. Drugs are commonly considered capable of participating in one or more of the following general kinds of therapy:
Curative or specific therapy:
treatment directed toward eradication of one or more of the agencies etiologic to the patient's condition. Antimicrobial drugs such as penicillin have specific or curative effects.
Palliative or symptomatic therapy
treatment directed only toward relief of the patient's symptoms, toward making the patient feel better without necessarily altering the natural course of the disease. Analgesic agents such as aspirin or morphine have obvious palliative effects.
Supportive therapy
treatment directed toward maintaining the patient's physiological or functional integrity until more definitive treatment can be carried out, or until the patient's recuperative powers function to obviate the need for further treatment. Many drugs can provide supportive therapy; even in a single patient supportive therapy can be provided from agents of such different classes as sedatives, diuretics, antihypertensives, etc.
Substitutive or replacement therapy
treatment directed toward supplying a material normally present in the body, but absent in a specific patient because of disease, injury, congenital deficiencies, etc. Adrenocortical hormones used in the treatment of a patient with Addison's Disease are used as substitutive therapy.
Restorative therapy
therapy directed at rapid restoration of health, usually regardless of the nature of the original disease; restorative therapy is most frequently given during convalescence. Vitamin supplements or sex hormones used for their anabolic effects might be considered as providing restorative therapy.
A single drug may have two or more therapeutic effects in the same patient at the same or different times, or in different patients. A patient may require more than one kind of therapy at a given time, or in the course of his/her disease.
Drugs may be used prophylactically to prevent disease or to diminish the severity of a disease should it occur subsequent to or during treatment; with a fine disregard for precision of definition, such a use of drugs is commonly called "prophylactic therapy". Drugs are sometimes used to measure bodily function and contribute toward the diagnosis of disease; such diagnostic agents have not yet been accused of participating in "diagnostic therapy".
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