I understand that carbon is what makes something “organic” or not, I just don’t understand why so many drugs are essentially hydrocarbons of varying sizes.
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Because if it was made any other way it wouldn’t work
I often thought about like how does a drug know exactly what body part is Ill, or how does it know how to affect me but the truth is it isn’t
The drugs are just affecting the brain and signals in order to seem like the effects are “working” our bodies are so fragile
Because most living things are made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Drugs attempt to mimic organic compounds that humans produce as chemical messages.
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The quickest analogy I can think of is to compare drugs to keys. Keys are typically made of similar base materials, but the little bumps and grooves let them work on different locks. With drugs, the base materials have lots in common, but the little differences in composition and configuration (a twisty of double-bond here or a different not-hydrogen there) let the drugs fit different purposes. In that analogy, the lock that the key fits could be a receptor on a cell or maybe the active site of an enzyme or so on.
Because that’s what most of *all* organic molecules are made of. Look any organic chemical and for the most part, you’re only mostly to see just 4 elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sometimes one or two others.
That’s because all life on Earth is mostly made up of those elements, so to be biologically active, a molecule has to be able to interact with our own biochemistry.
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