How / why does the body become physiologically dependent on a substance?
What happens to our bodies to create a physical substance dependence? Like the only way to prevent someone in severe withdrawal from dying is to give them more of the substance they are addicted to? It seems obvious to me that dopamine/serotonin etc have their effects in psychological dependence but shouldn’t our bodies react more positively to not being regularly hit with what is basically a poison/s?
In: Biology
My take: body is a incredibly precise machine that produces many substances for many reasons (eg alcohol) in small quantities. When you introduce an outside source of such substance, body detects it and stops producing it. Moreover, since your intake of such substance is much higher than it would be naturally, body adapts to increasing quantities of it. When you try to drop it, body cant perform certain functions since it doesn’t produce such substance anymore and it adapted to a much higher quantity of it anyway.
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