Laudanum are generally confined to controlling diarrhea, alleviating pain, and easing withdrawal symptoms in infants born to mothers addicted to heroin or other opioids. Recent enforcement action by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) against manufacturers of paregoric and opium tincture suggests that opium tincture's availability in the U.S. may be in jeopardy. The terms "laudanum" and "tincture of opium" are generally interchangeable, but in contemporary medical practice the latter is used almost exclusively. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss-German alchemist, experimented with various opium concoctions, and recommended opium for reducing pain. One of his preparations, a pill which he extolled as
Drug discovery Drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered through identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery. Later chemical libraries of synthetic small molecules, natural products or extracts were screened in intact cells or whole organisms to identify substances that have a desirable therapeutic effect in a process known as classical pharmacology. Since sequencing of the human genome which allowed rapid cloning and synthesis of large quantities of purified proteins, it has become common practice to use high throughput