Talk:Antagonist (medical)

Delete?
There might have been a time, way in the past, when "antagonist" was used as a medical term distinct from receptor antagonist. I don't think it's true, today, that anyone would use such a confusing term, and that antagonists are drugs that counteract other drugs is, I believe, a common but absolutely unfounded assumption.

If anything, this one-line article documents an outdated and rare usage of a literary metaphor in medicine, which really sounds a lot like a dictionary definition to me.

RandomP (talk) 16:47, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

To clarify: an antagonist (in the sense of receptor antagonist) does not reverse what an agonist (for the same receptor) does:  if both are given together, they stabilise receptor activity levels, rather than leaving them unchanged.

RandomP (talk) 13:44, 26 February 2009 (UTC)