If symptoms of a cold are just the body fighting the cold, what is the real harm of being sick?
In: Biology
The real harm of being sick comes from the body’s reaction to the virus, which can cause inflammation and other symptoms that make you feel unwell and can sometimes lead to complications.
Want to know what happens if you get a disease without an immune response? Look at what happens to a dead body. That is what the viruses and bacteria inside and around you are trying to do to you every second of the day, and once you stop fighting them your body literally rots. So yeah the fight part has some unfortunately symptoms, but losing that fight means you turn into a puddle.
>what is the real harm of being sick?
You getting eaten alive.
The symptoms are infinitely better than death in most cases.
thing that needs ur body to survive enters. uses your resources: food, cells, energy. body turns up temp to kill thing because it can’t survive at high temps. you can but not for too long. body becomes desperate to kill thing so it turns up temp too high or for too long. you start to stop functioning too.
The only reason the virus itself doesn’t do much is because your immune system reacts so swiftly and violently to it.
Without an immune reaction, the virus would slowly kill off too many healthy cells in (in the case of a cold) your lungs, making it impossible to breathe.
But because of your immune reaction, the virus doesn’t get the chance to do irreparable damage. The cost, of course, being the unpleasantness of the immune response. That’s why there aren’t symptoms caused by the virus itself – your immune system puts a stop to it before it can think about getting that bad.
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