Why can’t we improve medicines to not have side effects?

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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

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The body sometimes cannot deal with an issue due to some irregularity. If you take a medicine to compensate, your body now has to deal with this new substance. It needs to clean it out of your stomach and digestive track, it needs to clean it out of your blood, and it needs to ensure that it hasn’t stuck around in any of your muscles, bones, skin, or fat.

The body going through this process is what leads to a lot of negative side effects. The reason for thinning bones is often because calcium is needed to properly neutralize and remove the drugs from the patients system, and the largest stores.of calcium are in the bones. So the body starts stripping calcium from your bones, combining it chemically with the drug chemicals, and then pees it out.

There are also side effects thst are caused by the drug interacting with more than just the parts you want it to. Take antibiotics for example. Antibiotics kill almost all microscopic organisms good or bad for us. Taking oral antibiotics can often have a positive effect on an infection, as the body will take these antibiotics to the site of infection and use them to heal. However the body will not be able to do with with 100% of the antibiotics in the pill you consume, so some of it will make its way into your digestion and start killing everything in your gut. As a result, most people who take antibiotics orally suffer from the side effect of diarrhea as the microscopic organisms that help them digest food are damaged, dead, or trying to recover from the antibiotics.

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