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
Because the human body is a damn mess. Every chemical in your body is doing like five wildly different jobs depending on where in the body it’s located and medicine is trying to adjust *one* of those jobs without affecting the others.
Sometimes you manage to find a chemical or combination of chemicals that together affect only the desired biological system but usually we only figure out one or two of a dozen different factors and hope adjusting those doesn’t throw something else out of balance.
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