Steroid used in medicine and health care
Steroids are natural substances with many different effects in the human body, which begin over several days. The primary use of steroids in health care is to reduce inflammation and other disease symptoms. Steroid skin creams for example cause thinning and weakness of the skin, while steroids also cause calcium to leak out of bones so that they weaken and fracture spontaneously. Steroids also make people feel very hungry and cause blood sugar to rise.
People on steroids can gain weight and often develop a typical "moon face" as well as getting diabetes. We all need aggressive immune systems to fight infections and cancers, but steroids knock that out. People on high doses of steroids for medical reasons can die from chest infections and cancers of many kinds. We see these patterns in those who receive organ transplants, who need often need huge doses of steroids to stop the body from destroying the donated tissue. Cancers often develop, which shows us how important our white cells are in keeping us cancer-free, and how often all of us develop cancer in our daily lives. Most of us may have two or three tiny cancers inside us at any time. Taking high dose steroids makes it more likely one of these will develop rapidly.
People on high dose steroids are immune-deficient in every way so that many organisms that rarely cause problems can overgrow, totally upsetting the normal balance of mircobes in the body. An example is candida yeast which can grow rapidly in the mouth causing painful thrush.
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