It’s the Christmas season and, for many people, time to get merry. But pregnant women can’t drink – alcohol or caffeine – or can they?
And dose, apparently, works both ways. You may be able to have too much of a good thing, but you may also be able to have too little of a bad thing.
We often think that a drug does nothing to us until the point where it has an effect – the threshold dose. However, this describes a linear dose-response relationship… which doesn’t fit every drug. Researchers think that some substances follow a biphasic dose response: at some point they switch over from stimulating to inhibiting or from inhibiting to stimulating. Alcohol is one such drug.
This dose response phenomenon is known as hormesis, and is explained in more detail in this article.
All things,wrote Paracelsus,
are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.
And dose, apparently, works both ways. You may be able to have too much of a good thing, but you may also be able to have too little of a bad thing.
We often think that a drug does nothing to us until the point where it has an effect – the threshold dose. However, this describes a linear dose-response relationship… which doesn’t fit every drug. Researchers think that some substances follow a biphasic dose response: at some point they switch over from stimulating to inhibiting or from inhibiting to stimulating. Alcohol is one such drug.
This dose response phenomenon is known as hormesis, and is explained in more detail in this article.
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| The hormetic effect. © TWDK. |
