[ELI5] Why can we gain resistances to medicine, alcohol, poison, etc. but not so much for allergies or pollutants?
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One thing I don’t think anyone else has touched on (though there are a lot of posts here and I may have overlooked), is that the mechanisms of the things you’re describing are completely different.
Medicine, alcohol, and poisons work by ‘incidentally’ binding or interfering with your cells normal functions. A medicine might bind and deactivate a certain receptor for instance. Once that receptor becomes deactivated, the lack of signal may then activate pathways which eventually lead to the creation of more receptors. It’s essentially a cell’s effort to remain ‘baseline.’ This means you’ll require a higher dose to bind all the extra receptors. At this point if you stop the drug or whatever, you may then experience withdrawal until the number of receptors decreases back to normal.
Allergies are caused by the immune system responding to antigen that isn’t harmful or indicative of infection. There are built in mechanisms in place for building immune tolerance, where the immune system is primed not to react to certain things..but that’s a whole other rabbit hole. That’s basically the concept behind allergy shots tho.
Anyway, the answer to your question is ultimately because what you’re describing is an apples-to-oranges comparison of two different phenomena.
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