Know Your Body’s Security Dog

When you are born, a security dog is assigned to you. It’s mostly calm and placid. It protects you from intruders.

It even allows your friends, relatives, and well-wishers to come and go without hassle. It trusts you and your company, and it mostly naps.

But then you get into bad habits and questionable company, knowingly or unknowingly. The security dog opens its eyes. It does not like the people you are hanging out with. It suspects they are not good for you. It grimaces and naps.

Then things are stolen from you. Again and again. Costlier things start disappearing. Bad companions invite more notorious folks. Your house is in chaos and threatened.

The security dog wakes up and stretches. It decides to give you a lesson. It barks and bites those it thinks are harmful. It even starts chastising you for inviting undeserving and harmful people. It may bite you too.

The security dog is your immune system. The house is your body. The bites you get are autoimmune diseases.

The bites can take many forms. The provoked dog can bite you anywhere. Your autoimmune disease diagnosis will expand. The scared friends or adversaries may or may not continue coming around. But you have made yourself an enemy of the security dog.

You are afraid, in pain, alone.

You want to subdue the security dog. You give it medicine (read it immunosuppressant or corticosteroids). It naps from time to time, but it keeps attacking you. If it sleeps longer, enemies trickle in. You are in pandemonium.

When the medicine’s effect wears off, the security dog attacks you.

You don’t recognize enemies and let them in. You think the security dog is the problem. You want to kick it. But it comes with the house. You can get rid of it, only if you let your house go. Letting go of the house is death!!!!

So, what would you do? What should you do?

If you are thinking right, you should not have provoked the dog. When it barked initially, you should have listened to it, so that it would have slept longer, without meddling with you.

You still can avoid the bad visitors, and win the trust of your security dog.

I hope this security dog metaphor made you understand the importance of the immune system.

Let me explore our immune system's needs from another perspective.

I often like to think about our ancestors and how their lives might have been. There was a forest and several caves tucked in them. A group of people lived there. A tribe or a band.

There was a distribution of labor. Younger women gave birth to children, which the old women helped with. Some of the women went to forage for food. They picked fruits, gathered mushrooms, and dug for tubers.

Small kids played in the sun. Older kids and adolescents went fishing.

The men hunted deer as the animals came to drink near the watering hole. They dragged the hunted animals near their cave. They struck stones or drilled woods to make fire. They roasted the animal.

The food was shared with everyone. Not enough or just enough for everyone. No sugary desserts or preservatives.

They saw the stars in the sky and could predict weather patterns. “Tomorrow is going to be cloudy and rainy.” So, they stayed back in the cave and sharpened tools.

They ran barefoot, so they got cuts and bruises. The wounds got infections. Sometimes food was spoiled, so they got sick. Water sources got contaminated. It made them ill too.

They did not have proper warm clothing or weather-proof accommodation. So, they often caught colds, coughs, and fevers.

Their immune system was armed to tackle the above problems. There were no chemicals, so the immune system doesn’t know how to deal with them.

We are lucky now, to have weather-resistant housing, warm cozy clothing, clean water, pantry-full of food, and medical care.

So, our lifespans are much longer.

But alas, the desire to look good, to eat tongue-tasty foods, to inhale scented air, fear of germs, and want to grow more crops, has made people expose themselves to chemicals, which are inflaming their bodies.

The immune system is confused about how to deal with that, so all sorts of inflammatory diseases are appearing.

The immune system is our security guard, and we dare not provoke it. We must respect its constitution and heed to it's signals, for our own well-being. All the diseases these days are due to assaults on the immune system. Allergy is not a laughing matter. It’s the immune system saying: “I don’t like what you put in the body.”