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
Everything is connected in your body. Imagine giant dream catcher except all the strings are just one long string interwoven and perfectly symmetrical. If you pull at a string somewhere, something else moves. The bigger the change, the more something else is shifted. An illness is the dreamcatcher being uneven, and medication tries to fix the alignment.
Unfortunately thats why we have drugs to counteract other drugs. You want everything to be symmetric but if you move something you need to counteract it. somewhere else.
Quaaludes apparently gave a euphoric 2 hour high with zero side effects. So much so i’ve seen multiple people say how much they miss them because they were the best thing ever.
Drugs usually target a certain pathway and receptor in our bodies when we give a drug, we alter or shut that pathway down to get the effect we want. Many pathways do multiple things though. Therefore when you shut down the pathway you get side effects from other things that pathway does. For example ibuprofen (NSAIDs) Block an enzyme called cox1 and cox2. This shuts relieves inflammation and pain but it also inhibits anti-apoptotic signals to gastric mucosa cells which is why once side effect of NSAIDs is stomach ulcers
If a drug had no side-effect, it would have no effect. A drug happens to have certain effect, and when applied to a certain condition one of them is not a side-effect.
If you were to use medication for heart rhythm problems to combat a common cold, a side-effect would be that it affect heart rhythm.
A clear example would be Viagra, which was originally developed for high blood pressure. You can guess what the side effect was.
There were mainly 2 reasons given in this thread and I’ll add a third one:
1) Body has many mechanisms that work on molecular level and most molecules affect multiple systems, or one system’s distruption could affect other systems. (Morphine causing constipation)
2) Too much of a molecule causes too much of an effect (Blood pressure medicine causes very low blood pressure and shock)
3) Balance mechanisms try to balance a drug’s effect when it’s in the body, and when drug is out of the body balance is distupted towards the other way (First you drink too much caffeine to feel over energetic and after a while you drink coffee to feel normal and feel tired more than usual when you don’t drink it)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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