INFLAMMATION, GOOD OR BAD?

I like the answer to inflammation, good or bad, that I read recently in a health segment in a BH&G magazine. As one who suffers from many auto-immune diseases, I am greatly affected by inflammation so I was intrigued by the article titled "dialing down INFLAMMATION". David Rakel, M.D., professor and chair of the department of family and community medicine of The University of New Mexico called it a complicated relationship and I think that describes it well. He went on to explain that inflammation serves as protection in some instances. "Inflammation is one of the body's ways of healing itself," he stated. For instance, if you cut your finger your body starts an inflammatory process by directing white blood cells to the wound to fight bacteria and start tissue repair. That is when inflammation is helpful or good.

For many of us inflammation just simply gets out of hand and starts to attack our bodies unnecessarily. This can start by us being chronically stressed day after day, having a lack of sleep, eating too much processed food, etc. And I might add on my own here, some of us just have what I call a genetic flaw that causes auto-immune disease. Dr. Rakel went on to say, "When your body has an inflammatory response, it produces proteins researchers call the grenades of the immune system." A targeted grenade is helpful for fighting a specific infection but when they flow continuously throughout the body, they "begin to destroy healthy cells in arteries, organs, joints, and other parts of the body and can trigger various ailments." This is when inflammation is bad!

Here is the good news. Researchers have discovered that we can do some things to calm down and in some cases even prevent inflammation. Over the next few days, I will write about some of this good news. So back to Dr. Rakel's thought on inflammation, it is a complicated relationship.

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