What is the evolutionary significance of medicines for curing and treating diseases? Allow me to explain my question…
Your body automatically guards against foreign substances when it comes to things like bacteria and viruses. If one of those foreign bodies enters your system, your body goes haywire. Antibodies are immediately dispatched, and your body does just about everything else it can to fend off the intruder. This ofcourse has always been the case for humans since our entering of the earth ecosystem thousands of years ago. And it is closely related to how we evolved. If we couldn’t fend off diseases, or most diseases in any event, we would have never passed on our genes to subsequent generations.
Now think of all the medicines we take. These are foreign things to our bodies too, although they aren’t always intruders per se of course. But thousands of years ago, a good defense against any foreign substance might be of help to our ancestors. Eat the wrong berry or root, and having your body recognize it as foreign might have done our ancient parents good. Right? And yet our body does accept medicines. In fact it does more than that. With some medicines, our bodies may become acclimated to them, and miss them if they are gone. And I am not just talking about addictive drugs here. This is true of many benificial medicines. (All of what I just said is true of other animals too of course.)
So our bodies are clearly designed to allow medicines in them, which is good. But what advantage did that give us when we were just evolving?