Hormones affect the body in a much different way than chemicals targeting neurotransmitters in the brain. Your brain pumps out all sorts of tasty sounding chemical cocktails to perform a ginormous amount of tasks. From creating and recalling visual,audible and tactile stimuli to regulating your mood and all sorts of other very important tasks like remembering to breathe. Tolerance occurs due to constant use of drugs [term used liberally] that affect parts of your brain by dumping a higher amount of chemicals than the brain normally produces.
The reason this tolerance develops is because your brain tries to compensate for this imbalance by introducing larger amounts of other chemicals to those same areas in an attempt to balance them out. like dopamine/serotonin/mao's etc. also, the receptors themselves can get clogged/overwhelmed by the greater number of chemical triggers/inhibitors or whatever they are called. sometimes these receptors will enlarge to allow for the increase. this is why you would have to start taking more drugs for the same effect.
hormones are produced by your body to regulate cell growth, division, and also trigger chemical production in the brain and other parts of the body. every person's body is a little different. some people are deficient and need to take supplements to balance out. Other people may have an overabundance, in which case there are other types of hormone treatments to help reduce this and bring it back to a more normal level. The body does not really have many good [re: comfortable] ways with coping with an overabundance besides adjusting other related hormone levels. Because of this there is no tolerance developed for the extended use but rather other, unpleasant side effects from the long term use of hormones. not just growth hormones. i think some of those side effects have already been elaborated on in this thread so i will not get into that. but men can develop breasts, women facial hair, and all sorts of other funky stuff that the body normally would not do that most people would make a joke out of. Like shrinking balls.
This post was edited by perkocett on Oct 15 2009 09:30pm