prescription - a drug that is available only with written instructions from a doctor or dentist to a pharmacist; he told the doctor that he had been taking his prescription regularly. ethical drug, prescription drug, prescription medicine.
Definition. Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash. Although shingles can occur anywhere on your body, it most often appears as a single stripe of blisters that wraps around either the left or the right side of your torso. Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus â the same virus that causes chickenpox. After you've had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles. While it isn't a life-threatening condition, shingles can be very painful.
Shingles can cause changes to your body that are mild and annoying or serious and debilitating. The first symptoms of shingles are usually tingling pain, a burning sensation, or itching. These symptoms can affect any part of the body, but commonly turn up on one side of the waist or one side of the face. A few days or more after the pain and itching start, a person with shingles develops blisters on the skin of the affected body part. This skin rash clears up in a few weeks.