Description

Rang and Dale’s Pharmacology 7Th Edition

Preface

In this edition, as in its predecessors, we set out not just to describe
what drugs do but to emphasise the mechanisms by which they act.
This entails analysis not only at the cellular and molecular level, where
knowledge and techniques are advancing rapidly, but also at the level
of physiological mechanisms and pathological disturbances.
Pharmacology has its roots in therapeutics, where the aim is to
ameliorate the effects of disease, so we have attempted to make the link
between effects at the molecular and cellular level and the range of
beneficial and adverse effects that humans experience when drugs are
used for therapeutic or other reasons. Therapeutic agents have a high
rate of obsolescence, and new ones appear each year. An appreciation
of the mechanisms of action of the class of drugs to which a new agent
belongs provides a good starting point for understanding and using a
new compound intelligently.
Pharmacology is a lively scientific discipline in its own right, with an
importance beyond that of providing a basis for the use of drugs in
therapy, and we aim to provide a good background, not only for future
doctors but also for scientists and practitioners of other disciplines. We
have therefore, where appropriate, described how drugs are used as
probes for elucidating cellular and physiological functions, even when
the compounds have no clinical use.