How does poison and antidotes even work? are we just canceling out the poison with something else?
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Different poisons have different effects, but commonly shared by most is the ability to inhibit essential pathways the body needs. Think of it like a production line for making a cake in a factory: the batter is first made, then put into a tin and then into the oven. However in this instance the important job of icing the cake has been stopped. Now you have a backlog of cake within the production line and no cake being sold as they can’t be finished. The factory continues to try to make more cake eventually running out of flour, sugar eggs and continuing to add to the backlog of unfinished cakes. As no cakes are being completed and sold/ no income for the factory they can’t replenish the missing ingredients and inevitably the factory ends up shutting down. Your real life example of this is cyanide which inhibits the final pathway in respiration leading to your cells wasting reactants, becoming inefficient in production and eventually bursting from cell death. Nasty.
Antidotes also work in a variety of ways, however the main strategy deployed is to prevent these disruptions. This can be for example introducing a substitute for key and essential ingredients as described in the cake scenario (if there is no sugar for the cakes use icing sugar instead) however this is genuinely ineffective and usually too late. Instead antidotes essentially act as a bribe for the poison to attach to rather than the key enzyme/ cell that’s being targeted causing the disruption. This is why antidotes usually must be specific to the poison of interest, not everyone can be bribed with a cake, for some it might be a cookie, chocolate bar or sweet.
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