Modern Pharmacology in the Third Year — drug action, set beside the materia medica

A homoeopathic physician practises among patients who may already be taking conventional medicines, and alongside colleagues who prescribe them. Understanding what those medicines are, how they act and how they are classified is part of basic medical literacy. The Third Professional subject that supplies this literacy has a long and telling full title in the NCH Regulations: Principles of Modern Pharmacology vis-à-vis Homoeopathic Materia Medica. The “vis-à-vis” is the point. The subject studies modern pharmacology face to face with the homoeopathic materia medica.

A word on names. The CBDC curriculum document for the subject is titled “Essentials of Pharmacology”, and states “III BHMS / Essentials of Pharmacology, 45 lecture hours”. The BHMS Amendment Regulations of 2025 add “Essentials of Pharmacology” as an examined paper of one hundred marks in the Third Professional year. The platform’s room for the subject is called Modern Pharmacology. All three names refer to the same course.

The course content has four modules.

**Module 1: Pharmacology.** An introduction to the discipline — its definition and scope, the nomenclature and classification systems of drugs, and the routes of drug administration. A student will recognise the shape of this module from first-year Homoeopathic Pharmacy, which also studied nomenclature and routes of administration (under the name pharmaconomy). Reading the two side by side is a quick way to see where the traditions share a vocabulary and where they differ.

**Module 2: Pharmacokinetics.** What the body does to a drug: absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion — ADME — and the factors that affect them.

**Module 3: Pharmacodynamics.** What a drug does to the body: the mechanisms of drug action on the body’s systems, dose-response relationships, and the factors that modify drug action. Here the vis-à-vis becomes especially interesting. First-year Pharmacy included a chapter on modern theories related with homoeopathic drug action — principles of drug action, the molecular mechanism of drug action, and the mechanism of action of homoeopathic medicines — and a chapter on posology. The third-year module gives the conventional account of the same questions in fuller form.

**Module 4: Major drug classifications.** The largest module surveys the principal classes of modern drugs, organised by body system:

– the autonomic nervous system and autacoids;
– anti-inflammatory drugs;
– the central nervous system;
– the respiratory system;
– hormones;
– the cardiovascular system;
– the renal system;
– the blood;
– the gastrointestinal tract;
– chemotherapy, meaning the antimicrobial drug classes;
– and a miscellaneous group that includes disinfectants and vitamins.

The system-by-system organisation matches the organisation of the third-year Practice of Medicine course, which studies the respiratory, renal, digestive, hepatobiliary and endocrine systems in the same year. A student who reads the pharmacology of a system while studying its diseases will find that each subject illuminates the other.

**Why this subject belongs in a homoeopathic degree.** There are practical reasons and a reflective one. Practically, a homoeopathic physician needs to understand the drugs a patient may already be taking, to recognise their actions and their adverse effects, and to communicate clearly with colleagues in other systems. First-year Pharmacy’s chapters on adverse drug reactions and pharmacovigilance point the same way.

The reflective reason lies in the title. Homoeopathy has its own account of what a medicine is and how it is known — through proving, which the first-year Organon and Pharmacy courses studied with reference to aphorisms 105–145. Studying modern pharmacology face to face with that account sharpens a student’s understanding of both. The curriculum does not ask the student to merge them, or to rank them. It asks them to know each clearly.

A note on how this room is written. Pieces here explain pharmacology as a subject of study. They do not advise anyone on starting, stopping or changing any medicine, and they do not compare the two systems’ approaches to any particular condition.

As this room fills, a student will find pieces written to this syllabus: orientations to each module, explainers on pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, study notes that organise the drug classes by system, and comparative pieces that set the syllabus’s topics beside the first-year Homoeopathic Pharmacy course — nomenclature, routes, drug action, safety — as the subject’s full title invites. Everything here carries the third-year tag and the Modern Pharmacology category.