[ELI5] Why can we gain resistances to medicine, alcohol, poison, etc. but not so much for allergies or pollutants?
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Building tolerance is not the same thing as gaining it losing an allergy.
Tolerance is how your body metabolizes (breaks down) something introduced to the digestive system. Generally, it’s stuff you eat or maybe sniff or breathe. In any case, it comes inside as a thing your body recognized and knows what to do with. There’s a process for metabolizing things you’ve ingested and part of that is the liver and kidneys (for cleaning toxins) and part is the brain (for being altered by the strange substance). Even as you metabolize a substance faster and more efficiently, the toxicity (the poison part) of whatever it is its still just as potent – which is why addicts can still overdose and over time their bodies start falling apart. It’s all because your body knows what the stuff is and is very good at dealing with it but the poison is still just as poisonous.
Allergies are when your immune system assumes a substance is an unwanted invader and tries to get rid of it. Since the allergen is usually not biological (not a germ), the immune systems method doesn’t usually work. Since it doesn’t work, the immune system gets freaked out and works harder. That’s an allergic reaction and it can be so bad and so fast that you die. The problem is that if you dump this “unknown” into your body too fast or too much of it, your immune system freaks out faster and that’s how it’s so dangerous. Your immune system isn’t like your digestive system. Digesting helps you live. Immunity tried to keep you from dying. One is a relaxed knowledge “oh hey, this is alcohol. We know what to do about that” and the other is an emergency “oh my God! WHAT IS THAT! Kill it! Kill it! ” well if your body is trying to kill something that’s not really alive… it often ends up attacking itself. It’s not relaxed, it’s not wasting time trying to figure out what it is…. it’s just going into emergency mode right away.
If you ever had to calm down someone having a panic attack; that’s your immune system having an allergic reaction. But if you’ve dealt with a friend who has a messy house and you want to help clean it, that’s a tolerance building up.
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