Can you really develop a tolerance for things your body treats as bad? Poisons/Allergens. If so, how and why does this work?
In: Biology
If you’re talking about poison, if you take a little amount of poison everyday, and survive even deadliest poisons can’t be lethal for you.
I can only partially answer this, but one example of what you’re talking about is vaccines. When you get a vaccine you’re really being given a very very weak form of an illness. It’s not strong enough to really hurt you, but it’s enough to train your body against, and teach it how to fight that kind of illness.
Imagine, for example, that you were put in a boxing ring against a professional fighter. You probably wouldn’t stand a chance.. But what if that fighter had their hands tied behind their back? They couldn’t really hurt you, so you’d have a huge advantage, and you’d be able to learn how to punch effectively and knock them out.
King Mithridates the Great of Pontus (120 – 63 BCE) developed an immunity to a wide variety of poisons by taking small doses over a long period of time.
He became obsessed with poisons at the age of 11 after his father was poisoned in an assassination. He learned all that he could and was even known as one of the foremost experts of poisons and antidotes of his time. Soon after his father’s assassination he started to ingest small doses of a wide variety of them regularly throughout his life. This was so effective that even when he tried to kill himself in later life by drinking poison he didn’t die as he was immune to it at that stage. He even gave his name to an antidote to poison which was widely used in Europe for nearly 2000 years.
He was also an absolute badass/interesting guy. In his early life he lived under the threat of assassination by his own family as he was set to inherit the throne from his father. He withdrew from town life and spent 7 years living in the wilderness to avoid assassination attempts by physical means, and also to toughen himself up, all the while taking his cocktail of poisons. He defied the roman empire and was a thorn in its side for most of his adult life.
By the end of his life he could speak at least 22 languages, had many children with six wives (one of whom was his sister… Something something Game of Thrones…) and died when he was in his early 70s when he asked his bodyguard and friend to kill him with his sword after his failed attempt to poison himself.
Tl;dr yes, you can make yourself immune to poison. Mithridates the Great of Pontus did, he was also a badass.
Edit: should give more info about how this works (in actual ELI5 terms)
Your body breaks down poisons with special things called enzymes. You can think of there being one enzyme for each poison. These are made by a part of your body called your liver, which is beside your tummy. For a lot of poisons, a tiny dose will not kill you because your liver will be able to make enough of the right enzyme to break it down. If you take a tiny bit of the poison regularly, the liver starts to make more of these enzymes and this means your body can break down a bigger amount of the poison.
An important note is that this does not work for all poisons.
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