3 articles
First-order elimination, half-life, and accumulation to steady state — the small pile of exponential arithmetic that decides how often a drug has to be taken and how wide its safety margin is.
What antibiotics actually attack, why they do nothing to viruses, the four ways bacteria defeat them, and why a dose that is almost strong enough is the worst dose of all.
Local anesthetics block the sodium channels that carry the action potential; general anesthesia is a drug-induced state distinct from sleep whose mechanism remains unknown — and both live or die by keeping the concentration in a narrow window.