The Body’s Best Defense, on Overdrive
When inflammation harms instead of helps and how to stop it
When you catch an infection, your body responds with redness, swelling, and pain. This is called inflammation. It’s how our immune system gets rid of intruders.
This response is an essential part of the healing process. But inflammation can also work against us when things go wrong, it can become a major driver of disease.
How can something that heals also make us sick? It depends on how long inflammation lasts.
Stress triggers inflammation. If that stress is an infection, the immune system turns on the inflammatory response until the invader is thwarted, and the body goes back to normal. But when stress is constant and the immune system can’t kill it, inflammation never shuts off, and a process that should be temporary becomes permanent.