How does oral medication travel from the stomach to the problem area?

Question

For example, when I take antidepressant pills, how does the active ingredient get from my stomach all the way up to the synapses in my brain?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Chemicals you eat diffuse every where in the body. This is why side effects may exist, because there’s the spot where we want the drugs to go, but they may also cause something somewhere else in the body as well (since the drug goes everywhere).

This is why chemotherapy sucks. Ideally the drug would only go to the tumor, but instead it goes everywhere and wrecks the rest of bodily functions as well, and causes the hairloss. However, there are some cool newer drug designs meant to ‘target’ the tumor instead of being active everywhere, resulting in less chemotherapy side effects.