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
What starts with a C and ends with an annabis?
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.
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.
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.
Many systems in the body are regulated with various neurotransmitters, proteins, ions, and the like. They work like glorified keys in locks, where some are master keys that work in many locks, others with very unique keys that only work in one place.
The goal of any pharmaceutical therapy is to find a drug that acts on only the locks that are problematic, while affecting the fewest other systems. Unfortunately as before, there is a tonne of interplay between the systems.
Aspirin (ASA) thins the blood (because [reasons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin)). Have a headache or a heart attack? Take Aspirin, ASA thins the blood, allowing it to flow into constricted areas to reduce the pain or help deliver more oxygen. Have a bleeding stroke or bleeding disorder? Take aspirin and the thinner blood will…bleed even more easily. It’s not so much that aspirin is a ‘cure headache key’, it’s a ‘thin the blood’ key (among other effects).
To the original question – why isn’t there a perfect drug for a specific ailment? Because many body systems have overlap between their systems. The same thing regulating your blood pH balance can be responsible for digestive acid production and some other liver function. Affecting any one stage will carry on further down the line. Frankly, the fact that our bodies work at all is nothing short of astounding. Tens of thousands of chemical processes in delicate balance with slight perturbations causing disease and death.
Caffeine is actually a remarkable drug. It creates alertness without any serious side effects.
If it wasn’t so common we’d be amazed by it.
The body is a very complicated machine. It is constantly self-adjusting. Drugs are like taking a 9lb hammer and banging on something — it’ll fix that one thing but it throws off other connected things (and things are not always connected in immediately logical ways). The drugs tend not to absorb at a steady rate (taking a pill for example) vs the gradual ebb and flow of bodily functions, so also throws off the machine.
On top of all of your body’s biochemical overlap, which has been addressed in other comments, there’s a selective effect in which drugs get approved for use.
A more potent drug for a more serious condition might be worth enduring the side effects. You’d risk nausea and hair loss to save your life from cancer, but probably not to alleviate a headache.
Your brain has hundreds of levers (neurotransmitters) that it uses to tell you what’s going on. When good things happen, it sends moves some levers and you feel good. Drugs work by going in and messing with all the levers, so you feel/think/see things that aren’t appropriate for what is going on around you. This can sometimes damage the levers (or the parts that listen to the status of the lever) because your brain is only supposed to have certain levers on for a certain amount of time.
Damaging those levers (by keeping them on/off too long) can cause long term damage resulting in a world of disorders often including depression and long term paranoia.
We don’t know enough about the human body so we are targeting broadly across many areas.
If we target depression we might target serotonin but serotonin modulates a lot of other functions and we don’t know how to target serotonin in just the brain, most serotonin receptors are in the stomach so a common side effect is nausea.
Now we know after 30+ years of targeting serotonin that serotonin might be just modulating something else and that something is what we should be really targeting.
Latest Answers