Medical How is new terminology introduced to a field?

[ampakine]

I think we badly need some new terminology for substances that have biological effects. We need more general words for these substances, the word "drug" just isn't enough. For instance we should have a word for a drug used to alleviate the symptoms of an ailment to reduce the ambiguity associated with just calling them "drugs", a term which also encompasses drugs that actually cure the ailment. We should have 3 different commonly used words for drugs depending on which nervous system they affect. A word for drugs that only act on the CNS, a word for drugs that do not cross the BBB and directly only affect the PNS and a word for drugs that affect both. How does new terminology for not so new fields become accepted though?

 

[Proton Soup]

is it even true that there are drugs that only affect the CNS? serotonin (a common CNS drug target) was discovered in the gut.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin#History

i think most new terms are simply cobbled from a mix of ancient Latin and Greek, the traditional languages of scholarship in europe.