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
All medications have side effects. Your body is a huge, complex network of many different cells that have many different functions. When you flood your bloodstream with a foreign chemical, that chemical has all sorts of effects depending on where it goes and what cells or processes it interacts with.
To simplify, think of your cells and medications as puzzle pieces. Your cells have lots of different shapes that can accept lots of different puzzle pieces. A medication is a puzzle piece that could fit in many different places even if it’s not a perfect fit. Generally, we try to design medications so that there aren’t many places it can fit in your body, which results in side effects being less common.
For the “old” medications you mention, a lot of it is economical. If an old medication works with side effects that are mainly discomfort and aren’t long-term harmful, it doesn’t make sense to invest the billions of dollars to make marginal improvements and try to eliminate the already few side effects. It makes much more sense to invest those billions on new cancer drugs, for example.
Latest Answers