Word: aspirins
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There it stayed until the 1890s, when Felix Hoffmann, working for Friedrich Bayer & Co. outside Düsseldorf, tried the drug on his father and found that it miraculously eased the old man's rheumatic pains. Hoffmann's boss, Heinrich Dreser, coined the name aspirin, and rushed the drug to market. Aspirin was a registered trade name, and still is in Germany, though it lost that privileged status in the U.S. in 1917, when the Monsanto Co. began to make it in large quantities. Like nearly all other important chemicals, it is now made synthetically from coal...
Universal Sovereign. In the early years, doctors learned about aspirin from their patients. They prescribed it for rheumatic pains, and patients volunteered the information that it also cured headaches. It has become the universal, sovereign remedy for dropping a fever, and for pain of practically any kind from hangover to cancer. In the rheumatic disorders, aspirin has a double action: it not only eases pain but, by lowering the temperature of inflamed joints and muscles, actually helps to check the disease process itself. It has a similar double action in gout. Aspirin's supremacy as an antirheumatic was threatened...
Some physicians have found evidence that aspirin may literally act like the hormones and stimulate the patient's adrenal glands to work better. A similar added benefit is suspected, but not yet proved, for victims of kidney stones: originally prescribed only to relieve the pain, aspirin may help to keep new stones from forming...
...Aspirin has a great advantage over most other painkillers, notably morphine, in that it is nonaddicting, and the dosage does not have to be progressively increased. It has no attraction for suicidal adults: the vast majority of people can take huge overdoses without killing themselves...
...overdose may be lethal for small children, and 100 or more in the U.S. die from aspirin poisoning in an average year. Thousands more, beguiled by candy coatings and flavors, are made so deathly ill that they have to have their stomachs pumped out. Aspirin irritates the lining of the stomach, and ulcer victims often find the effects of the medicine worse than the headache they are trying to cure. In extreme cases, they suffer internal bleeding or their ulcers perforate. As with all drugs, a few people are abnormally sensitive to aspirin; even a normal dose may cause dizziness...