why does your body get achy when you are sick?
In: 3557
One of the aspects of your immune system is to throw toxic chemicals at invaders. This works fine when you have a localize infection but when it’s in your blood you end up with swelling and aches everywhere your immune system encounters the infection. Infections can also cause damage to your body by themselves.
Part of the inflammation reaction to an infection is to release cortisol, also known as the stress hormone.
That hormone does a lot of things, but one of them is to make you feel icky and sore.
The primary reason that it’s released is more likely to be the other stuff that it does. But the fact that it makes you actually rest when you’re sick and also reduces the chances you’ll go out of your cave and infect the rest of the tribe probably did help the trait be selected for by natural selection.
So it’s a feature, not a bug. People and tribes that got sore and achy when they were sick did better in the long run than groups where they stayed happy and chipper.
None of the top comments (at the moment of posting this) are correct.
The achy feeling is caused three things:
– General inflammation. The immune system uses inflammation basically as a way of communicating to itself and other body systems “Send resources here to help me fight the infection”. This inflammation itself causes pain, and sometimes it can spill over into areas of the body that aren’t in need of special attention. There’s a theory that this muscle and joint ‘spill-over’ inflammation pain is ‘intentional’ by evolution, because it causes us to be less active, which helps with recovery (rest), but this hasn’t been proven.
– Toxic activities by the immune system. In some places, the immune system (white blood cells) are actually killing other cells that have become infected. The chemicals used to send these “kill” messages can also have a ‘spill-over’ into other areas of the body, causing pain. This is not a major part of sickness aches, though.
– Swollen lymph nodes. Your body is covered in hundreds of lymph nodes connected by a separate circulation network. When you are fighting an infection, one part of your immune system is trying to basically catch (eat) infected cells and pathogens and then bring them to lymph nodes where that can be broken down and/or shuttled away as waste. During this time, your lymph nodes swell with fluide and also experience some inflammation which helps get resources to them so they can work more effectively.
Hope that helps.
its part of the inflammatory response, it releases this funky hormonla compound we call Cortisol that among other things causes that feeling.
its effectively the body giving you the hint to ” sit the fck down and rest”(as that makes you more likely ot recover and if you cannot recover makes you less likely to end up isolated and not infect your fellow cave dwellers)
The fever you get you basically heats up your body to kill the infection but it also damages your own cells which is why getting super high fever is dangerous because your body doesnt know when to stop. So you ache because youve basiclaly been internally cooking for however long you had a fever