Three episodes on BBC Radio 4, 6 to 20 August at 9 pm

Producer Beth Eastwood

Programmes also available to download at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/onemansmedicine.shtml

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The title of Gerald Carson's book about patent medicines, One for a Man, Two for a Horse (Doubleday, 1961), did not tell us what its author thought about drug doses in women and children, but it did at least intimate that there is variability in responsiveness to medicines, the theme of these three half-hour radio programmes.

Men and women, blacks and whites, old and young–we all differ in the ways in which we respond to medicines. And the sources of variability are legion: differences between pharmaceutical formulations; in understanding and compliance; in drug disposition (pharmacokinetics) and pharmacological responses (pharmacodynamics); in the ways in which variable kinetics and dynamics are translated into therapeutic and adverse outcomes; …