Is it trying to fix itself by closing the airways?….Or is it just a reaction and not a defense.
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Biological machines are not perfect. People act like Nature’s playing a video game and making decisions based on what will work best. In reality nature is just rolling dice and giggling at the outcome, with very little thought involved.
Anaphylaxis is a kind of allergic reaction. We still don’t understand a lot about allergies, but we know they’re a situation where the immune system goes too far. Imagine a fire crew shows up to a burning building and finds the fire is in just one room. They proceed to put the fire out, then walk through every room, spraying every wall with their firehoses so thoroughly the drywall comes apart. By the time they leave they’ve done more damage to the structure than the fire they came to fight.
That’s kind of what happens when an allergic reaction starts causing anaphylaxis. We think allergens are stuff the body identifies as bad that the immune system should attack. Sometimes that alone is one of nature’s little mistakes.
Across humanity, the average response to one of those triggers is not life-threatening. You might get sneezy, or a runny nose. That’s meant to expel airborne things. That happens by making tissues in certain places swell or activating certain glands. That’s why you also might get hives, or a wound where stuff got in gets sore. It’s part of and side effects of how your immune system deals with stuff, kind of like how the firefighters still damage a lot of stuff even when they’re careful.
But in a few rare people where nature’s experimenting, the tissue swells A LOT or the glands go into hyperdrive because the immune system isn’t like “get this out” but “HOLY SMOKES WE HAVE TO ELIMINATE THIS”. This system is already insane, so it doesn’t much care if it’s swelling your throat so much it blocks your airways, and the brain’s not set up to handle this kind of malfunction.
That’s also why the medicines we have in things like Epi pens work so well. They’re chemicals that tells the immune system “CHILL THE HECK OUT YO” very aggressively. This isn’t great either, and it tends to take a pretty big toll on a person’s body. But it saves their life, so it’s worth it. There’s just not a great way to dose it out so their immune system chills “a little”.
We’re still learning a lot about how this all works. One of the ways COVID kills people is very similar and we don’t know an awful lot about that either: it seems adept at teaching our immune system to fight our own body. Worse, we’re starting to learn some diseases can “erase” the “memory” our immune system has (this was discovered as a property of measles, and we’re suspicious COVID can do it too.)
So think about this pretty hard when people say “let nature take its course”. Sometimes “nature’s course” is to program someone’s body to kill itself if they pet a cat. To me that’s a pretty darn good reason to rebel against nature’s course at just about any opportunity we have.
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