It seems like the more potent a drug/medication is, the more risks are involved with it, where as drugs with very little risk don’t help nearly as much.
In: Biology
I’d say caffeine is pretty close to a perfect drug (when used in moderation). The primary routes of adminstration, coffee and tea, both show life extending properties. The only problems come from overdose or withdrawal, and even a perfect drug would have withdrawal.
Overly simplified –>
Its like a mathematical equation – you can’t just do one thing to one side of it. We’re all running in equilibrium, even if its not an ideal equilibrium, and when you take something you are knocking YOUR body out of equilibrium, so it will react in some way.
What starts with a C and ends with an annabis?
There is a saying, ‘There is nothing strong enough to help you, that isn’t also strong enough to hurt you.’ A big part of medicine is making sure that the trade offs are understood and that the downside is outweighed by the positive effect. Since a core concept in medicine is ‘informed consent’ you have to be made aware of these… but people are bad at understanding the trade offs.
The body runs on a bunch of balances. Water is a good example, as you know, not enough and you die… but conversely if there is too much water to everything ratio, you also die.
Medicines change something that affects that balance. But often that then affects the balance of something else, something unintended. That is the side effect. In many cases the medicine might have another use where that side effect is actually the primary effect (say sleepiness with allergy meds) and the primary effect in the other case is now a side effect.
From Douglas Adams:
“The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.
“Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?
No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”
In other words, your body is an interconnected whole, not a bunch of independent systems. You can’t tweak something in one place without affecting other parts of the system.
They cause an imbalance in the four humors of the body, if you minimize one humor another is certain to rise!
On the molecular level drugs are generally telling your body to do something different. That signal change usually tells a bunch of other processes to behave differently, which in turn tell a bunch of other processes to behave differently, and so on. You can have a drug that only changes “one” thing and a zillion functions behave differently.
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I think the answer is there’s not really such a thing as “side effects.” There’s just “effects.” A decongestant “may cause drowsiness” as a side effect and the very same drug as a sleep aid “may cause dry mouth” as a side effect. The drug is the same, it’s just whether the effects of the drug are advertised on the front of the box or not.
There are some drugs that are great and have almost no risk, but the fact that they exist means that other drugs for the same treatment don’t get used anymore.
So the only time you see multiple drugs for the same issue is when there’s a tradeoff involved.
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