why can’t we eliminate side effects from certain drugs?
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Think of side effects like buying ice cream. We like ice cream, but we don’t like paying for ice cream. The “costs” to your body, are the side effects. Cancer drugs for instance: they work by killing the fast growing cells in the body. Cancer cells are fast growing, but so is stuff like hair and finger nails. Side effects are like neccesary evils to important drugs.
Side effects are just normal effects except you don’t like them. Your question is kinda like “why can’t we eliminate smashing things from hammers and just keep the nail driving effect”. For example, chemotherapy is literally poison that kills off rapidly multiplying cells. Both cancer and hair follicles are in that category, so chemo -> baldness. If you want to keep your hair, you need an entirely different approach to attacking the cancer cells.
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Things are interacting on a chemical level, and chemicals that come into contact with other chemicals have some predetermined effects. For example, putting vinegar and baking soda together results in a bubbling volcano. Now of course there’s ways to mitigate undesired effects, but not all of them. You could maybe coat the baking soda in a hydrophobic material preventing it from coming in contact with any vinegar, but now the baking soda is basically inert and cant do the job it was meant to do.
Its a tradeoff getting something good enough that prevents something worse than the side effects.
Depends on the mechanism of the side effect.
A blood pressure medication will always have the potential side effect of dizziness because that what happens if you lower blood pressure too much. There is no way around that other than getting the dose right and even then it’s not always perfect.
Off target effects or impurities etc can be fixed but usually by changing the drug’s chemical structure or manufacturing process. For example newer generations of antihistamines don’t cross the blood brain barrier as well and so they don’t cause the same drowsiness older generations do. Or enantiospecific formulations of drugs remove the “inert” enantiomer which isn’t always inert (they also allow for drug companies to get new patent protections but that’s another discussion).
There have been some great answers here. I’ll add my 2 cents:
The body is **remarkably complicated.** You have a bunch of different processes running at the same time that do things like regulate blood sugar and mood and appetite and kidney function. Literally a thousand different processes.
To regulate blood sugar you have different processes that act against each other. Your body releases insulin to decrease blood sugar, but also glucagon to increase blood sugar. It’s not an either/or scenario; they work in tandem. One doesn’t switch off when the other switches on.
Side effects are from drugs that are taken to regulate some of those processes (like blood pressure for example). To offset the side effects isn’t as easy as finding the key to it. Let’s say a side effect of the drug is raising your blood sugar. You need to solve the issue for insulin production, but also glucagon production at the same time. It isn’t that easy because that can affect other processes as well. The balance between these systems in your body never ceases to amaze me.
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