Allergies, based on my understanding, tries to protect you. But why does it try to kill you in the process?
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Your immune system hurts you all the time. That’s what a lot of symptoms of illnesses are. You get a fever because your immune system is increasing your temperature because the increased temperature will kill the disease. It’ll *also* kill you. Eventually. But the disease usually dies first.
Allergies are, to put it overly generally, your immune system overreacting.
For an analogy, imagine someone comes up to you and tries mug you. You punch them in the face. Your hand hurts a little, but you successfully drove them off, saving yourself.
Now imagine you see your shadow on a brick wall and mistake it for another mugger. So you punch them right in the face and dislocate a finger. Unfortunately the shadow mugger has not fled so you need to keep fighting. You punch again, breaking a finger. Still hasn’t fled. You knee them in crotch, breaking your knee. They still haven’t fled. In desperation you headbutt them. You end up with a concussion, still better than if the mugger kills you. But the mugger *still* isn’t gone!
Then you take allergy meds and oh boy is your face red! It was a shadow the whole time, it wasn’t actually a threat.
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Basically the body detects something unknown in the body and calls on the defence systems to get rid of it, but since these are used to destroying bacteria or viruses, they fail against the substance causing the allergy, so the defence mechanisms go into overdrive and the more they try the more they fail. An antibody called immunoglobulin E overreacting to what it thinks are infections and causing excess histamine to be released which in turn can cause severe reactions possibly leading to anaphylaxis. https://youtu.be/zk_oUk0bwxs
Airbags are designed to protect you in case of accident, but can injure you if they activate when they shouldn’t.
Same with immune system.. it is supposed to protect you from dangers, but some people’s systems activate on wrong things… Polen for example
It’s like if your airbag activated whenever you turned on your turn signal
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