[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.
The things you mentioned have **different mechanisms**.
**Medicine**
* Are you pertaining to antibiotic resistance? Basically, germs evolve in order to protect themselves from the medicine that’s “killing them”. A knife keeps on stabbing me? I wear bulletproof vest. A flame keeps burning me? I bring water to extinguish the cause of the flame.
**Alcohol**
* Continuous/routine ingestion of alcohol forces our body to adapt or become more efficient in removing the alcohol that we consume. This results to *tolerance.* One example is when our body begins to secrete more enzymes. These enzymes makes it easier and faster for alcohol to come out from our body.
Why did I mention these mechanisms? You cannot compare the the resistance/tolerance of medicines/alcohol with allergies because *they work in different ways, different causes, and have different approaches*. That should answer your first question.
**Moving on.**
Allergies are an **immune response** of the body against foreign substances because our bodies see them as harmful even if they are not. Some people get over their allergies, some people do not.
One way to get tolerance is through allergy shots which carefully exposes your immune system to these allergens in hopes that your immune system will finally realize that they are not a threat. With this, your body won’t overreact thinking that a mere dust is there to kill you.
We do. I used to be allergic to peanuts, chocolate and cats.
Continuous and incrementally increasing exposure helped me get rid of those allergies. I know have 2 cats and eat peanut butter sandwiches every night and Snickers bars every kow and then.
Also, you should do it under the supervision of a doctor if your allergy is more severe than rashes and sniffles, ie. anaphylaxis, though it is rare to have an allergy that sever unless you are immunocompromised in some other way.
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.
Allergies are your own body’s overreaction, so not quite the same as a substance that directly acts on the humam body in a consistant way. Also, some allergies can be “trained” out, but very carefully and under close medical supervision!
Resistance is something that takes time, both as a species and as an individula.
Pollution is simply too “new” to humans and constantly changing so humanity simply hasn’t had the opportunity to develop consistant defense against it. Of course with the micro plastics found in human blood, maybe we are becoming one with it…
I think with seasonal allergies there’s too much variation in the different types of pollen that from year to year and even town to town it can differ.
Other allergies work like that though. When I was born I was allergic to hundreds of things. Things like flour and strawberries. I don’t remember being allergic to most of them, however, because I outgrew them so fast. Two big ones that have stuck with me are milk and eggs, however ever since late high school I can eat them when baked into things as it denatures the protein and changes the protein. My allergist has seen patients follow this track and eventually become able to eat the substance raw. So it is possible.
Fun fact: with peanuts there are multiple parts of it once can be allergic too and there are some that people can outgrow and some that they can’t. Guess which one I have lol.
For all the people saying “exposure to the allergen helps,” that’s bad advice and not one size fits all. There are people whose allergies get worse over the years. My allergies can turn into terrible skin patches and real asthma attacks.
“Just get allergy shots” is not a guaranteed solution either. Many allergy shots contain aluminum (dosed with it each time) which doesn’t belong on the body at all and the shots aren’t completely guaranteed to work. I’d rather not get worse and take the risk.
The *best* solution I’ve found has been avoidance. Avoiding the allergens as best as possible. For me, it means no cats and dogs and a dust free environment. My emergency inhaler on stand by if I ever need it only when necessary and my epipen near.
I was bit by so many mosquitoes as a kid that I no longer itch or welt when they bite me now.
Plenty of therapies have been developed to lessen or cure allergies. TBH i dont know why more people do not make use of these as they _can be_ 100% effective if done correctly.
Also people grow out of allergies all the time. Usually this has to do with being exposed to small quantities in the environment over time and the body adjusting to these being the norm instead of trying to go into defense mode against them.
The main exceptions I’ve seen to this is people allergic to vertain pollens…its more of an issue with their sinuses and the receptors there and how well the mucosa encapsulates the irritants than a specific immune response, Though there have been people who have “grown out” of these as well. Though I think the mechanism may be slightly different than folks with food allergies.
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