title: Chaos and illusion.
abstract: Pharmacology is the study of the interaction of drugs with living organisms, especially humans. The body is a very complicated system, which suggests that the 'effect' induced by a drug is not a single entity but a change in several variables at the same time, all of which are interrelated in a nonlinear fashion. Research on nonlinear systems in other fields of science--commonly known as chaos theory--may therefore be of use in understanding pharmacology, as explained here by J. M. van Rossum and J. E. G. M. de Bie. They argue that in the study of drug effects, several variables should be measured simultaneously. Many pharmacologists prefer to construct an illusion of reality, studying just one of the essential variables and averaging data in a population of subjects, thus losing the opportunity to understand what a drug really does to a patient.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmacology, Medical Faculty and Faculty of Sciences, Catholic University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: van Rossum
authors.forename: J E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: de Bie
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D010600:Pharmacology