Eli5 why we get sick or why it takes so long to recover
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Things that shouldn’t be in body get in body, body doesn’t like so gets hot to kill things inside. Sometimes it takes long time to get rid of icky stuff in body.
Takes time for the bodies spies to work out what and where the invader is , recruit and reinforce warriors to either catch and destroy the invader itself, destroy any fortifications it has already taken, and strengthen those castles it hasn’t? Especially difficult if the invader is camouflaged or attacks the defenders themselves.
for why we get sick there’s three main reasons: something is trying to eat us, we’re lacking something or have too much of something and we can’t deal with that, or some process in the body has gone faulty.
anything infectious: colds, athletes foot, ebola, scabies: they’re all things trying to eat us in one way or another. if we were a corpse, they’d render our body a gooey mess in a few days between them.
your body has to first identify and fight off the threat, that’s your immune system’s job. the immune response itself is what causes most symptoms, fever, vomiting, itching, etc. but it’s better than being rendered a gooey mess. it takes some days for a full immune system response to come online and then it’s got to actually successfully attack the invader, if it can. this is an arm’s race as invaders that evade the immune system quickly go on to invade other hosts. kurzegezate has a great book on how the immune system works: https://youtu.be/0FRVx_c9T0c
if you’ve got something out of balance, like too much salt or not enough vit a, your body be trying to do its thing but it will be like trying to drive with no water in the radiator or tyres that got over inflated. there’s usually an easy fix when you lack something. when you’ve got too much your body will usually process it out provided you survive long enough.
processes going wrong are the least common but often the most severe. they include things like cancer, where a group of cells forgets to follow the correct lifecycle and grows into a mass. auto immune conditions are where the body has wrongly identified something as an enemy and is attacking it, but that something is a part of you.
once whatever is wrong has been dealt with, your body then needs to repair the damage caused by whatever went wrong. if you think about how long it takes a cut to heal: that can be several days, and it might not heal perfectly, it might scar instead. so there’s that aspect too, just because the worst is over, doesn’t mean you’ll be fine immediately.
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