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ambiguity as I rolled them around on my tongue:
memantine, levodopa/carbidopa, donepezil. Was that dawn-
EH-pazeel? Or DONNA-pezel? Where does the accent go? I
wondered. I would settle on one pronunciation, fairly
confident I had nailed it, until a doctor would use a
completely nonintuitive pronunciation. Wow, the things you
learn in medical school! I would then go to another doctor’s
office, ready to impress him or her with my proper
pronunciation, only to have that doctor smirk, confidently
asserting that this third variant of donepezil (“Everyone
knows that the first e is silent!”) was in fact the authoritative
version.
Pronunciation aside, what do these drugs actually do?
These quirky-sounding compounds work by altering levels
of neurotransmitters. Dementia drugs are not the only
compounds that do this—many prescription drugs, from
antidepressants to ADHD medications to drugs that reduce
anxiety, tinker with levels of these important chemical
messengers. While these types of drugs are among the top-
selling pharmaceuticals in the world, other compounds that
humans have gravitated to across cultures also work
similarly—coffee, alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, and even
sunlight all make us feel a certain way because of their
impact on how neurotransmitters work.
The notion that our brains don’t work the way we want
them to because of unbalanced levels of neurotransmitters
has come to be known as the “chemical imbalance” theory.
This theory is most commonly associated with depression,
for which it states that feeling blue is caused by low levels
of serotonin in your brain. But new research suggests that