Why do our bodies build up a tolerance to some medications but not others?
In: Biology
Medications that mess with receptors (mood, pain, etc) are similar to a younger sibling running around shutting every door in the house, flicking every light, making a ton of noise. Your brain eventually tunes it out by ignoring the drug (whether its effects are good or bad, it sees it as an imbalance). It does this by learning to open the doors, turning the lights off, and ignoring the noise just as fast as the medication. Eventually it cancels out the medication as the brain becomes balanced again. This is usually the point where your dose would be raised and the cycle would repeat.
Now while we’re here, to understand withdrawals, imagine the sibling was suddenly removed from the household. Now your brain is going around opening already open doors, turning off lights that are already off, and trying to tune out noise that isn’t there. This is what produces the unpleasant feelings of withdraw.
**Simpler version that doesn’t try to setup for a withdraw example:** You take a medicine to turn down how loud your pain signals are. The brain wonders why it can’t hear the pain very well, and as a result it eventually starts to listen harder. Soon enough it’s like you aren’t taking it at all.
Some medications build tolerance like a seesaw (essentially fighting it to try to create balance), causing unpleasant effects when you stop them and the brain levels out again. Others build tolerance and just stop working.
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