This question came about as my wife has just started a course of steroids to treat her Crohn’s Disease. They work amazingly well, amazingly quickly… But they are only a temporary solution as they have a range of significant side effects such as thinning of the bones, insomnia, etc…
Steroids are “old” in medical terms – why haven’t we managed to remove the side effects yet?
In: Chemistry
The human body is an incredibly complex machinery of chemical reactions. Medicines act by changing or affecting that machinery slightly to get the desired effect.
But the machinery is so complex that it is impossible to make a change that has only a single effect. There will always be other effects.
When those other effects are undesired, noticeable, problematic or risky, we call them side effects or adverse reactions.
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