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
Side effects aren’t something that can be removed from a specific drug. The drug does what it does, and some parts of that aren’t desirable. If we were to change the drug it would do different things, in which case we aren’t removing the side effects but using something else. It might be helpful to think of what we call side effects as something “extra” that happens. It’s more like the drugs just do all of that, and the stuff we don’t like at the moment are side effects. We call wildflowers weeds when we want a lawn, but a treasure when in the park.
This is kind of like asking why we don’t make metal knives that don’t cut fingers. We’ve had metal knives for thousands of years, surely we can make one that is sharp, but cannot cut fingers.
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