All medicines have side effects?

[needimprovement]

Responses from physicians, scientists, or SFN members sought and welcomed.

[Moontanman]

I would have to say that is probably true 99% of the time anyway.

[swansont]

Lots of non-medicines have side effects, too.

[Mr Skeptic]

Pretty much everything has side effects and will kill you in large enough doses. Including water.

[CharonY]

To be precise, there is no such thing as side-effect. It is part of their whole effect. It is just not the one that is desire under a given condition. However, the side-effect of a given medication in one condition can be used as an effect (or cure) for another condition.

 

Essentially it is like saying that a potential side-effect of sugar is obesity.

[needimprovement]

Thank you.

Now let me rephrase the question.

 

Why all medicines have side effects?

[CharonY]

Because all medicine/chemicals have a bunch of effects on the body.

Edited October 18, 2010 by CharonY

[Mr Skeptic]

Because things can be used for the purpose of one of their many effects, and all the rest are side-effects. Not sure why you're limiting this to medicine; it applies to pretty much anything.

 

Eg: a side-effect of exercise is a temporary increase in blood pressure, and you are more likely to get a heart attack while exercising than while not. Therefore, a temporarily increased risk of heart attack is a side-effect of exercise. However, exercise decreases your resting blood pressure for an overall reduction in risk of heart attack (plus increased fitness which is yet another side-effect if you were exercising for your heart).

[John Cuthber]

Even placebos have side effects.

[needimprovement]

Thank you for the responses. It seems that designing a good medicine is difficult because you need to design a drug that binds to and activates or inactivates one single type of target in a cell without binding to and affecting any of the other millions of molecules in the body, able to cross biological barriers, easily synthesized, etc

 

I think this is more appropriate in Chemistry forum.

[TonyMcC]

It is a fact that I take a combination of drugs to combat the effects of coronary heart disease. Someone once asked me whether I was aware that all drugs have side effects. My answer was that I was aware of the side effect associated with not taking them - I die! Keep taking the tablets!

[ewmon]

It seems that designing a good medicine is difficult because you need to design a drug that binds to and activates or inactivates one single type of target in a cell without binding to and affecting any of the other millions of molecules in the body

Some biopharmaceuticals are meant to have such precise applications, especially when they supply otherwise endogenous substances that the person's body fails to make in appropriate amounts/forms/etc, thus resulting in the disease/syndrome/etc that the maker intends the biopharmaceutical to control.

[CharonY]

On the other hand, even endogenous metabolites have more than one effect. Our metabolism is highly interconnected and adding something on one end can lead to weird effects elsewhere. Even just supplementing deficiency can be tricky, e.g. in terms to getting the dose and timing right.

[Guest Emma]

As a chinese saying goes, every medicament has side-efec

[Guest Abir]

No I am agree with you. According to me herbal or natural medicine do not have side effects. It is totally effective to our body. As a example Himani Boroplus Antiseptic Cream is a very nice antiseptic cream. It is a herbal medicated cream.

[John Cuthber]

No I am agree with you. According to me herbal or natural medicine do not have side effects. It is totally effective to our body. As a example Himani Boroplus Antiseptic Cream is a very nice antiseptic cream. It is a herbal medicated cream.

 

LOL

[Versa]

What I believe is, most of the time, there will always be a reaction. The thing is that the side effect might not be noticeable in some way or another. For instance, a medicine might cause something we might not aware of at all or the reaction might not be significant.

[Marat]

Most medicines used by allopathic medicines are toxins since they are not designed to cure the disease which is causing the unpleasant symptom, but instead just poison the natural response of the body to disease and thus suppress the symptom. Conventional medicine gave up long ago trying to cure anything and instead just focuses on masking symptoms. Thus for example, while benfotiamine is a natural substance which is actually curative for neuropathy because it is a pro-vitamin of B1, allowing high concentrations of B1 to form along the nerves and restore them to health, conventional medicine rejects this, in large part because there is no money in it, since as a natural substance it cannot be patented. In contrast, it prefers to suppress the pain which arises from neuropathy with various drugs which poison the natural ability of the body to sense discomfort from decaying nerves, and it regards this symptom suppression as the only acceptable treatment.

 

While there are a few medicines in allopathic medicine which could be regarded as ameliorating deficiency conditions rather than as suppressing symptoms, such as insulin injections or thyroid supplements, these also produce unwanted side-effects since they are not delivered to the body in tailored doses by the organs naturally charged with regulating their constantly changing levels, and are instead just given to the patient in crude guestimate doses a few times a day rather than continuously and as needed.

[John Cuthber]

Allopathic is broadly the opposite of homoeopathic.

Homoeopathic medicine doesn't work.

Presumably, that means allopathic medicine is the branch of medicine that actually woks.

Marat seems to ignore quite a lot of reality in his post.

Surgery- physically correcting problems.

Antibiotics- poisoning the microbes that are causing the disease.

Chemotherapy- poisoning the cancer cells which cause the disease.

and others.

 

Any neuropathy caused by vitamin B1 deficiency should (and I think would) be treated by the administration of vitamin B1.

Why use a pro drug (i.e something that the body has to turn into the real drug) when the real drug is readily available and cheap?

 

As for insulin, it seems he has missed out on developments like slow release forms (which have been around for decades) and pumps designed to provide it at a more natural rate. He laos seems unaware that, at least some, diabetics measure their blood sugar and adjust the insulin dose accordingly.

 

In fact, about the only example of what he says that I can think of is the people take aspirin to reduce their temperature when they have a fever.

A lot of us don't bother and current medical advice is only to do so if the temperature is high enough to be a problem in its own right.

[Marat]

In the history of medicine there have been a huge range of different medical approaches, including allopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine, eclectic, Thomsonian, osteopathic, Ayurvedic, you name it.

 

A normal pancreas releases thousands of microdoses of insulin per day in response to blood sugar increases, and no insulin deliverty device in existence today can do that. No matter how many times a day a patient gives a bolus of insulin, the insulin will only start to act about 20 minutes after it is injected, and there is no known way exactly to tailor a delivered dose to the body's constantly changing requirements. The best diabetic patients can do is adjust their insulin dose to current glucose levels and anticipated carbohydrate consumption, but they can't even know how constantly changing levels of insulin resistance at the cell walls, constantly varying levels of blood sugar elevating hormones such as cortisone and thyroid hormone, variable rates of digestion, subclinical inflammation, and a myriad of other factors will transform even the most accurately calculated insulin dosage into unwanted hypo- or hyperglycemia.

 

Similarly, if you have ever tried to titrate the 'right' dosage of thyroxine for a hypothyroidic patient, you will know how approximate the results of this sort of hormone replacement therapy can be, even though it is infinitely simpler than insulin therapy.

 

I'm not sure why anyone would describe most surgery or chemotherapy as 'curative' or hold that it is without side effects. IQ points are lost with every application of general anesthesia; bones never perfectly mend to be as strong as before they were broken; surgical incisions always result in some loss of nerve tissue, etc. Chemotherapy certainly has some of the worst side-effects of any medical treatment, and many patients find them so bad that they prefer to go without treatment than endure chemotherapy's horrors.

 

But of course it is all a matter of degree. In some areas of medicine, such as orthopedic surgery or some infectious diseases, for example, medicine does come fairly close to correcting the pathology the patient presents with, but in most others, the results are fairly dismal.

[Dak]

Pretty much everything has side effects and will kill you in large enough doses. Including water.

 

Also, some people are allergic to pretty much anything, including water. So, for some people, water effectively has a 'side effect'.

[Marat]

Also, everything has a 'lethal dose 50' number, or LDL 50, which represents the dosage per kilogram of body weight of a test subject at which 50% of those subjects die of the tested substance. Even water has an LDL 50, though since it is fairly non-toxic, the number is high. So in this loose sense everything can be regarded as toxic.

[John Cuthber]

"No matter how many times a day a patient gives a bolus of insulin, the insulin will only start to act about 20 minutes after it is injected, and there is no known way exactly to tailor a delivered dose to the body's constantly changing requirements."

If that's true then the same will hold for whatever the natural process is.

 

"I'm not sure why anyone would describe most surgery or chemotherapy as 'curative' or hold that it is without side effects."

Nobody said surgery was without side effects. What I said was that, for example, fixing a cleft lip isn't treating a symptom- it's fixing the problem.

Chemotherapy has plenty of side effects- ut in many cases it gives as close to a cure for cancer as most people consider important. (if you have cancer, get chemotherapy, the cancer goes away and, in the end, you die of something else then for all practical purposes the chemotherapy cured the cancer.)

 

"IQ points are lost with every application of general anesthesia;"

 

Any evidence for this?

I know plenty of people how go out for a drink (i.e. apply a general anaesthetic) every Friday. if they lost a single IQ point on each occasion then after 2 years most of them would have negative IQs.

That's not really what happens is it?

[jenifer]

May be, All medicine have side effect.

[Marat]

The way insulin is naturally released in the human body it is very easy to keep glucose in the 80 to 120 mg/% range, with only brief excursions up to 130 after a large carbohydrate meal. The reason is that the normal pancreas contains tens of thousands of islet cells, each of which senses the glucose level independently and pours out the required amount of insulin continuously in response to what it senses is required from it. If one functional unit overproduces the others underproduce to compensate; if one underproduces the others overproduce to compensate. The fact that the output occurs in millions of micro-doses all the time from multiple independent sensors guarantees that the net dose is carefully tailored to the requirements. Also, the insulin is released from the pancreas is metabolized rapidly on a first pass through the liver, in contrast to injected insulin, which is delivered subcutaneously and peripherally, so it is always metabolized too late for the requirements.

 

All a human operator can do is to check the current capillary blood glucose level (which is already an arbitraty measure of the true insulin needs throughout the body), estimate the current amount of insulin required to reduce the blood sugar to the required level, since physiological processes constantly change insulin requirements, and inject a bolus which will be metabolized too late and will persist in the body too long to address the immediate need.

 

The result is that blood sugar control via insulin injections or pumps is always only approximate, which creates a roller coaster effect between periods of non-physiological hyperglycemia and non-physiological hypoglycemia, with this latter effect, if severe, possibly causing unconsciousness, permanent brain damage, or even death. The regulation of blood sugar with injected or pumped insulin is so approximate with today's technology that 4% to 6% of all type 1 diabetic deaths are due to hypoglycemia. So the side-effects of the treatment are today actually killing more people every year than the disease itself, at least in the developed world.