Category:Non-psychotropic medicines

pharmacopedia.wiki is, first and foremost, a reference for prescribers of psychoactive and CNS-active medicines, the medicines that act on the brain and on the mind. Most of what the wiki covers belongs to that world. A small number of medicines that do not principally act on the central nervous system are nonetheless covered here, and this category collects them. It exists to mark a boundary honestly: a reader who arrives at one of these pages should understand that it sits a little outside the wiki's main subject, and should understand why it was included anyway.

The medicines gathered here are not a pharmacological class. They share no mechanism and no common origin. What they share is a reason for being on an otherwise psychoactive-medicine wiki. For most of them the reason is a genuine point of contact with the wiki's central subject. The beta blockers are the clearest example: although their primary use is in cardiology, propranolol and the other lipophilic beta blockers cross into the brain and are used for performance anxiety, for the physical symptoms of anxiety more broadly, and for akathisia, the restless inability to keep still that is a common and distressing adverse effect of the neuroleptics. A wiki that covers the neuroleptics in depth cannot easily leave out the medicine most often reached for to treat one of their hardest side effects. The other medicines in this category have been included on related grounds: they are frequently prescribed alongside the wiki's core medicines, they bear on the metabolic adverse effects that the neuroleptics and other psychoactive medicines so often cause, or they are simply common enough in the lives of the wiki's readers that an honest reference cannot omit them.

This category collects the wiki's non-psychotropic medicine pages. They are grouped by class.

• Beta blockers: the beta-adrenergic antagonists, primarily cardiovascular medicines but also used in psychiatry for performance anxiety, for the somatic symptoms of anxiety, and for neuroleptic-induced akathisia. Propranolol, the most lipophilic and the most often used for these CNS-relevant indications, is the anchor of the group.
• GLP-1 and GIP receptor agonists: the incretin-based medicines, indexed under GLP-1 receptor agonists and GIP receptor agonists. Semaglutide is a GLP-1 receptor agonist; tirzepatide is a dual GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist. They are used for type 2 diabetes mellitus and for weight loss, and they bear directly on the metabolic harms common to psychoactive treatment.
• Antidiabetic medicines: the medicines for diabetes mellitus, indexed under Antidiabetic medicines. They are included for their bearing on the metabolic adverse effects of the neuroleptics and of other psychoactive medicines, and because they are prescribed so widely alongside the wiki's core medicines.
• Anti-obesity medicines: the medicines for the management of obesity, indexed under Anti-obesity medicines. The incretin-based medicines overlap this group; following the wiki's multi-membership convention, those medicines are indexed in both places.
• PDE5 inhibitors: the phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors, sildenafil, tadalafil, and the others, used for erectile dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction is a frequent adverse effect of the antidepressants and of other psychoactive medicines, and the PDE5 inhibitors are commonly prescribed in response.

The line this category draws is a practical one, not a sharp pharmacological one. "Psychotropic", strictly, means acting on the mind, and a medicine is non-psychotropic when its therapeutic action lies elsewhere in the body. But several of the medicines indexed here do reach the central nervous system and do have CNS-relevant uses, the beta blockers most obviously; they are called non-psychotropic on this wiki because their principal indication is not a psychiatric or neurological one, not because they have no effect above the neck.

The category is deliberately small, and it is not intended to grow into a general pharmacopeia. The wiki does not aim to cover cardiology, endocrinology, or internal medicine in their own right. A medicine earns a place here when it has a real and recurring connection to the care of people taking psychoactive medicines: a shared adverse-effect burden, a psychiatric off-label use, or a frequency of co-prescription that a prescriber using this wiki would expect to find addressed. Medicines without such a connection are out of scope, and their absence is intentional rather than an omission.

Each medicine indexed here has its own page, built on the wiki's standard structure for a medicine: a history-first account, then pharmacology, indications, adverse effects, and interactions. Where a medicine has a CNS-relevant use, that use is given its due alongside the primary indication, since it is usually the reason a reader of this wiki has arrived at the page.

This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages. It carries the MedCategory marker tag. The medicines indexed here are all of pharmaceutical origin, having entered use through scientific discovery, and the category sits beneath Pharmaceutical and beneath Medicines.