Edit: Thank you very much for the gold! I hope the comments made to this post were as helpful to others as they were to me.
In: Biology
My wife’s purse is a portable pharmacy. She takes pills for every little thing. And always complains they don’t work. I really wish she would stop doing this
I rarely take any medicine. Unless I have a severe back pain or headache. Aleve is pretty much morphine for me
It basically depends on how the drug works. If, for example, the drug is meant to add or adjust a chemical that is imbalanced, your body can stop producing as much of that chemical or, thinking you have enough, shut off the receptors to it. This is a reason why taking testosterone is dangerous. Your body might not produce enough of it once you stop.
A lot of medicine, when taken, makes the body slack off on making its own version of it. For instance, antidepressants. We take them to regulate chemicals in the brain, and they do a good job, but then the brain gets lazy and slows production. This causes the medicine to work less well, and you have to take more to make up for the lazy brain.
This is the best I could do for ELI5 style- neurochemistry isn’t for little dudes lol
To add on to what others have said, [this study](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613143629.htm#:~:text=According%20to%20Maini%20Rekdal%2C%20gut,helpful%2C%22%20Maini%20Rekdal%20said.) shows that some drug tolerance could be caused by gut microbes. If you’re taking a prescription every day and a certain microbe in your gut can eat it that microbe will increase in numbers over time, and as it increases it will consume more of your medication.
The mysteries of pharmacology/pharmacokinetics are something else!
Another interesting phenomenon can be found in drugs that have no ceiling dose.
Imagine you live in a tiny house. Your stove will heat up the apartment but your ac will counter it. Some drugs are like turning your stove up very high. Eventually you turn your ac on to counter it, and will even out so you’re back to room temp (building a tolerance)
This is if the drug effects chemical levels. Drugs like alcohol are like installing a giant vibrator in your house. A house has no way to counter the vibration, and will shake until it stops.(some houses are more immune to vibrations like how some people are more immune to alcohol).
Expanding a little about withdrawl, After years of the vibrator, some things may become lose and damaged, and the inhabitants of the house become use to the vibrations. If you ever been near heavy vibrations for a long period of time that suddenly stop, you notice and feel weird right away once it stops, as you are expecting it.
For chemical drugs, you turn off your stove (stop taking a drug) but your body wont turn off the ac right away. If the “heat” is blocking the pain and the ‘ac’ is your body trying to feel the pain, you can have a big issue when you turn off the stove all of a sudden.
Drugs that act as agonists lead to tolerance. The relevant receptor is stimulated eventually causing the nervous system to reduce the number/frequency of receptors in response. This allows you to build tolerance. Some drugs don’t have this effect and can be the opposite (antagonists). The more you use an agonist drug the more tolerant you will become as the number of receptors you have for it decreases. So you may be more tolerant than another person due to this. Opposite happens when using an antagonist drug, that causes addiction. That’s my simplified version that I can remember from university!
Because yesterday was Benzodiazepine Awareness Day and benzodiazepine are drugs that cannot be tolerated, I’m sharing these things.
[The Benzodiazepine Medical Disaster (with Heather Ashton)[VIDEO]](https://youtu.be/MVoFlGR7Lhs)
[Benzodiazepine Symposium 2019](
https://youtu.be/cS9eYKgUUTM/#t=45m02s)
[Lisa Ling’s The Benzo Crisis [VIDEO]](https://youtu.be/1tWpw8-2aMw)
[Benzodiazepines Mimic Chronic illness [ARTICLE]](https://www.benzoinfo.com/2018/04/28/how-benzodiazepines-mimic-chronic-illness-and-what-to-do-about-it/)
[10 Things Uninformed Benzodiazepine Prescribers Do](
https://www.benzoinfo.com/2018/06/23/10-things-uninformed-benzodiazepine-prescribers/)
[Ashton Manual on [AMAZON]](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QGNP9BL/ref=cm_sw_r_apa_i_fYnLEbQN75KCM)
[Web edition of the Ashton Manual](https://www.benzo.org.uk/bzmono.htm)
Share this with anyone who you know is taking any of the following medications:
**alprazolam (Xanax)**
**clonazepam (Klonopin)**
**chlordiazepoxide (Librium)**
**diazepam (Valium)**
**lorazepam (Ativan)**
**temazepam (Restoril)**
**triazolam (Halcion)**
Stay safe.
An important distinction to make here, as it’s often misunderstood: **tolerance** and drug **resistance** are not the same thing.
**Tolerance** is the reduced reaction of a human patient to drugs due to repeated or prolonged use.
**Resistance** is the reduction of effectiveness of antibiotic and antiviral drugs due to the acquired resistance of the bacteria or viruses they are meant to treat. Simply put, resistance is a bacteria learning to defend itself against antibiotics, resulting in stronger pathogens which cannot be fought against with routine antibiotics. This endangers patients in the long-term as antibiotics simply stop working to protect us. Routine surgeries become more dangerous as a minor infection can become deadly.
Depends if the body has a system which is able to measure the influence of the medication and also counter balance the effect. This is called homeostasis and is mostly a problem for long time steady dose medications or drugs ie. coffein that you throw in every three hours is easier to get a tolerance than ibuprofen that you take every two weeks.
Some drugs target system that are just not balanced in the body, insulin would be an example as far as i know. The amount of insulin is control by bloodsugar and as insulin effects bloodsugar it is its own regulator making an additional feedback loop unnecessary. But take that with a grain of salt i could imagine such a loop exists and i just dont know about it.
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