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
If you want the drug to make a “change”, then you run the risk of side effects, and you are right that the magnitude of the side effects can be related to the size of the change.
Organisms are highly optimized, if it takes work to make a molecule then using the same molecule for many tasks is more efficient than making a different molecule for every task. When a drug changes the rate or production for the molecule, all the tasks that use it are impacted. Maybe you want to drug to change one task so you feel better, but the molecules are all impacted and there will be side effects.
Much of drug research is trying to make very exotic changes so that the net effect is more like what you want. Unfortunately, every person is different, and a different balance of tasks leads to a different amount of side effect.
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