why do some medicine take an hour to kick in and some like anti depressants take weeks to work?
In: Chemistry
So, the way drugs work depend on the way they move through out the body and the way that they affect your biology to fix the problem.
You can think of your body as a hugely complicated machine with many interconnected mechanism.
Some of these mechanisms work very fast. For example, a nerve cell can fire an impulse in a fraction of a second.
Other mechanisms work very slowly. For example, if you get a cut on your skin, it could take days or weeks for your body to form a scar and then heal.
There are slow processes in your body that are as slow as wound healing but we can’t see because they either happen internally inside your body, or the “injury” is more subtle, like a group of your cells aren’t working correctly together anymore, and it takes time for them to find a new balance. Sometime you have to wait for some cells to divide and for other ones to die to restablish the correct synchronization, which can take a days or weeks.
Typically, when you take a pill, the drugs inside the pill will spread throughout your body in about half an hour, and then they will get to work tweaking the chemical knobs that control different mechanisms in the body. If the mechanism works fast, like nerve furings, you will feel the effects as soon as the drugs have spread.
If the mechanism is slow, like wound healing, you may not see a big difference for days or even weeks.
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