Importance of Your Immune System
The immune system forms an integral part of your body. It is the absolute protection against any harmful foreign molecules, whether infectious or non-infectious. The antibodies are particularly helpful. They are as specific in binding antigens as the “Key and Lock” works – and that is the meaning of our logo in this site.
The immune system is like a defense army in a country. The beauty of nature is that you don’t have to be highly educated for your immune system to work for you. It works for both literate and illiterate people. However, a basic understanding of how it works can help you enhance it.
The enhancement that I mean here can range from eating the right foods to adjusting your lifestyle like avoiding stress and/or getting enough sleep. These will help strengthen your immune system. Whichever way you choose, you cannot enhance anything you have no knowledge about – Immunology is vital.
Drugs Do Not Work, It Is The Immune System That Does
The immune system can become incompetent because of HIV infection, cancer, or cancer chemotherapy among other reasons. If this happens, you become ill with opportunistic infections despite taking various drugs and drug combinations. If your immune system was competent, the drugs would help you recover very fast. Therefore, good health is not about drugs but the immune system.
The immune system always fights foreign attackers in your body. If the immune system is overwhelmed by the attacker, then disease arises. When a disease arises you need treatment. The drugs reduce the overwhelming number of attackers then the immune system ultimately clears the antigen. We therefore conclude that the drugs cannot do much without a competent immune system.
Your Immune System is like Your Dog at Home
This dog looks aggressive and dangerous just like immune system towards unwanted antigens
The rule is “Accept self and fight foreign”. Your immune system is like your dog. Let me explain this vital analogy: Your dog recognizes and protects you and members of your family at home. On the other hand, your dog ruthlessly fights anyone from outside your family. Any visitor/foreigner is dealt with accordingly.
The immune system works in exactly the same way. It recognizes and protects your own cells. Every member of your body is protected. On the other hand, all foreign bodies including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, helminth, fungi, foreign tissues e.t.c are fought ruthlessly.
If the im
The Immune System is Highly ‘Educated’
If the immune system was to be awarded a degree, it would be awarded at the highest level – “Pass with Distinction” for its intelligence and beat everybody else.
Just like like you can go to college to study immunology, the immune cells go for ‘education’ in their ‘college’ (Primary Lymphoid organs – Thymus and Bone Marrow). The T cells are trained on how to distinguish self from foreign in your thymus. The B cells get the same training in the bone marrow. So your immune cells learn to protect you and fight foreign bodies coming to your body.
Like you can be suspended from college for failing, the cells that do not learn properly (Failures) are deleted in ‘positive selection’ and ‘negative selection’ to avert potential autoimmunity in the future. When there is autoimmunity, the situation is analogous to human mental illness.
The immune system goes ‘mad’ and begins to attack the very self antigens it normally protects. The mechanisms of tolerance for self have failed. This is analogous to the behaviour of a dog infected by the rabies virus which begins to attack the very people it protects.
Like you can be suspended from college for failing, The cells that do not learn properly are deleted in ‘positive selection’ and ‘negative selection
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