Late-night question regarding drug/disease database

[mefloquinedream]

Thanks again for the help I've received here. Sorry if I appear a bit clueless at times; I'm a medical student, not a programmer

Let's say I have one table for a variety of disease: primary key field would be the disease; other fields would include fields for various symptoms, fields for various etiologies (causes), and a field for the drug of choice to treat it. Now, let's say I wanted to link this table to another table, one which records all the drugs used (the drug name field being the primary key), their mechanisms of actions, their uses, their side effects, their contraindications, etc... Now, maybe I'm misunderstanding the normalization rules, but wouldn't including the name of the drug used to treat the disease in the first table while simultaneously having a second table listing all drugs violate normalization rules? If not, is the task of relating the table as simple a matter as defining the drug name field of the disease list table as the foreign key in a relationship to the drug name field (the primary key) of the drug list table? Or is there a much simpler way to do this?

 

[David Eagar]

an early morning answer

I think you are on the right track
Disease in first table is linked by PK to possible treamnents (and properties_ in the second table