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
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.
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