If Botox is a drug made from a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum (the same toxin that causes a life-threatening type of food poisoning called botulism) why doesn’t it make us sick?
In: Biology
It’s always the dose that makes a poison. There’s a safe dose for everything as long as it’s small enough.
Botulin is a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes your muscles, but in in microscopic doses, it turns out that the paralytic effect is pretty good at masking wrinkles.
If I may interest you in a more technical discussion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7874868/
Well. Sometimes, it does make us sick. That’s why it needs a trained doctor.
But since it’s mostly selected to be slow spreading, and the fact that it’s in the muscles and nerves instead of the GI tract means that the effects are more localised and decidedly non-lethal.
It makes you sick in a controlled and desirable way. C. botulinum is a food poisoning that causes paralysis, not just your usual “food poisoning”. So take that, dilute it many hundreds of times, and inject it in a very localized spot.
Arguably it does make one sick. If your arm swells up a bit, you don’t say “hey that’s healthy!” You might say, “It’s not swelled up enough to go to the doctor.” (or you might not notice). The swelling is the “sick” response that covers up wrinkles.
Botox doesn’t move once it attaches to a nerve.
As long as the dose you inject is small enough that all of it stays with the nerves at the injection site, there won‘t be any elsewhere.
The doses used in Botox are extremely tiny. Like not visible if you dried a vial of Botox.
The amounts of Botox you are exposed to when eating chlostrium botulinum contaminated food, or have an active infection as an infant breathing in dirt, are massively higher and spread throughout the body.
Even when you accidentally inject a vial of Botox into a vein, the dose is low enough to only cause slight weakness everywhere and not paralysis and death.
The dose makes the poison, with everything.
Small amounts of vitamin A are essential to live, you need it. Dose yourself with a years worth of vitamin A and you die.
Small amounts of cyanide are always present in your body, small amounts of formaldehyde and methanol as well: but if you dran the latter two, or inhale/eat the first you are exposed to levels hundreds of times higher than your body is able to cope with and you die.
Botox isn’t special in any way, apart from it being very potent as a toxin, meaning the dose it turns into a poison at is pretty low.
But as with all poisons additionally where in the body you put them also matters.
You can eat a tea spoon of salt and will puke at worst.
Inject said teaspoon of salt dissolved in a bit of water anywhere inside the body; it will destroy the tissue it comes in contact with.
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