Word.ws English Dictionary

pharmacophobia

pharmacophobia noun: the irrational fear or avoidance of a medicine, or of medicines in general.

Noun

pharmacophobia (uncountable)

  1. The irrational fear or avoidance of a medicine, or of medicines in general.
    • Suggest a dinner-pill or a seidlitz powder, and his face is convulsed with a fanatical pharmacophobia! His soul abhors the doing of such profane violence to the processes of nature!1858 May 8, John Addington Symonds, “On Headache”, Lecture III of the Gulstonian Lectures for 1858 at the Royal College of Physicians, printed in The Medical Times and Gazette, John Churchill and...
    • Summary: Five cases are described in which fear of the possibly hazardous effects of giving amphotericin to patients with kidney disease resulted in death from a progressive infection by an amphotericin-sensitive fungus ([…]).1973 November 24, W. St C. Symmers, “Amphotericin Pharmacophobia”, in British Medical Journal, archived from the original on 01 Aug 2013, pages 4: 460-463

Origin of pharmacophobia

From pharmaco- + -phobia.

Questions about pharmacophobia

What does pharmacophobia mean?
Pharmacophobia means the irrational fear or avoidance of a medicine, or of medicines in general.
What part of speech is pharmacophobia?
Pharmacophobia is a noun.

Words near pharmacophobia in the dictionary

  1. pharmacophagous
  2. pharmacophagy
  3. pharmacophenotype
  4. pharmacophenotypes
  5. pharmacophilia
  6. pharmacophobia
  7. pharmacophore
  8. pharmacophores
  9. pharmacophoric
  10. pharmacophorically
  11. pharmacophorous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pharmacophobia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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