I understand the body is attacking itself, but can someone give me a metaphor or an example to make it make more sense? I am trying to explain to my boyfriend and I can’t make it make sense to a layperson not familiar with the ins and outs.
In: Biology
There’s a lot of soldiers inside you. Usually they neutralize enemies without us knowing, sometimes they need backup forces like antibiotics. Sometimes the soldiers get confused and attack each other, so we need generals to go in (like pred) who tell the soldiers to stand down. When you have an autoimmune disorder, the soldiers are particularly prone to confusion, so you need to send a UN general in daily to clarify the orders.
Your immune system causes inflammation in response to outside threats. Sometimes your body can over react and creates an immune response to a normal bodily function.
This is why prednisone is a typical treatment for a lot of autoimmune diseases – it lowers your immune response.
Imagine a high-class club with a bouncer who has a list of everyone allowed to come in and everyone who’s been blackballed. You’re on the blackball list? You get beat up and driven to the desert. Imagine that some trickster managed to edit it so that an important VIP was removed from the good list and put on the bad list. Despite their insistence that they were invited, they get beat up and sent to the desert.
Immune cells have a list of chemical markers that they use to recognize friendly body cells and foreign invaders. If one of the body cell markers gets put on the wrong list, the cells that carry them get attacked by the immune system as though it’s some big bad pathogen. When that happens on a large scale, we get an autoimmune disease.
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