Pharmacotherapy Essay

Introduction
The aim of pharmacotherapy is the achievement of defined therapeutic outcomes that recover a patient’s quality of life while minimizing patient risk (1). Drugs show their efficacy only if administered in appropriate quantity with appropriate combination of drugs and foods and at appropriate times. A drug interaction is a situation in which a substance affects the activity of a drug (the effects are increased or decreased, or they produce a new effect).Typically, drug-drug interaction come to mind. However, interactions may also exist between drugs and foods, as well as drugs and herbs/supplements. Foods may alter the effects of drugs by interfering with pharmacodynamic mechanisms (the effect can be synergistic, additive, or antagonistic)

Knowledge and assessment skills are required to improve the patient safety (4, 17-19). Clinical pharmacist can play an important role in nurse training as an effective method to reduce food-drug interactions in hospitals (18). However, we found that patients who instructed by nurses were also at high risk for potential food-drug interactions. It means that they do not pay enough attention to nurse recommendation. But they should know that communicating with physicians and pharmaceutical consultants seems to be an effective ways to preventing food-drug interaction interactions (19). It is recommended that the health professionals along with the pharmacist, has a duty to aware the nurses and the patients for the signs and risk of possible side effects

As a second limitation the actual pharmacotherapeutic complications due to the potential food-drug interactions were not evaluated. As a third limitation, this study was conducted in one inpatient teaching hospital and the results may differ from the results of studies in other centres. Future studies are warranted to further evaluate the real outcome of food-drug interactions. Moreover, future research to consider the knowledge of physicians, pharmacists, nutritionists and nurses about the food-drug interactions is recommended. Communicating with nurses seems to be an effective ways to preventing food-drug interaction interactions.
To improve the performance of medication administration, training courses related to food-drug interactions by pharmacists to physicians, nutritionists and nurses is suggested.

Conclusions
Potential food –drug interactions are very common among patients hospitalized in internal medicine ward. To lower the frequency of potential interactions it could be necessary to decrease the number of medicines prescribed or make a careful selection of therapeutic alternatives. To avoid impairment in the treatment, prior patient knowledge of food – drug interaction has to be