Two Medical concepts I grappled with this week 🐻

Stroke medicine: The female sex has a higher background risk of stroke, regardless of other factors compared to males. The reason for this, we do not yet know?

Tachy-phy-laxis: A pharmacological phenomena where repeated use of a particular drug, requires higher subsequent doses to remain effective, as the body stops responding to the previous lower dose. It is one of concepts within the study of drug tolerance.

This is a problem I had to deal with on a patient who has used stronger and stronger corticosteroids for her excema, more specifically contact dermititis, since childhood... Hence we needed to treat her with an alternative drug mechanism. We went for topical Tacrolimus (an ointment which has anti-cancer properties).