Food & medicine incompatibility.

Abstract

HE INTERACTION between food and drugs has been a subject of much concern to the medical profession and antedates the present era of socalled rational therapy. Ancient writers were much preoccupied with the need to specify when a medicine should be given in relation to food. Traditional indications for drug usage have included the terms anti cibum (a.c.), cum cibum (c.c.) and post cibum (p.c.) which denote at least the concept that a state of fasting or feasting could promote or decrease the pharmacological effects of drugs. Today, although we have greater technical facility for the investigation of these effects in the laboratory, because of the inherent difficulty in disentangling the effects of drugs from the natural history of disease and other events, there are still only a few cases in which such effects have been shown to