Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast.

I am your host, Eric Christensen and pharmacist, of course.

And today I'm going to cover Cimetidine, which is the brand name of Tagamint.

Now, this medication is classified as an H2 receptor antagonist.

And if you remember mechanistically,

so parietal cells are in the gut, the stomach,

and they secrete stomach acid, which ultimately lowers the pH.

And histamine actually binds on those receptors and stimulates them to produce that

acid. So by being a histamine 2 receptor blocker, we can actually prevent, reduce the amount of

stomach acid that is secreted.

Okay, so that's how that drug works to reduce stomach acid.

So you could imagine what this medication would primarily be used for,

any type of situation that you've got an excess of stomach acid and or that acid is causing

damage, discomfort, pain, things like that. So GERD, if you've got some sort of peptic ulcer,

things of that nature, acid secretion disorders, where the body produces excessive amounts of acid

potentially. And a good example, that is Zollinger-Ellison syndrome. Those are good examples of what

this medication might be used for. One of my greatest frustrations with cymetidine is that this

drug is available over the counter. I rarely, rarely see it used. I can't recall the last time I had

seen it prescribed, but I did want to cover it specifically because it is available over the counter.

And the reason why it's not used is because it has a ton of drug interactions.

But patients who may not be that savvy, they see acid reducer on the counter, over the counter,

and they may pick it up and start using it.

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