Member-only story
Featured
Inflammation: Our Greatest and Most Dangerous Ally
How our ultimate defense mechanism becomes our biggest threat, and the biology behind the “betrayal”
Inflammation. We could consider it the word of the century, given how often it has been repeated in the world of health and wellness (perhaps second only to artificial intelligence, that one’s been coming up a lot lately…).
Inflammation. The greatest enemy of our biology.
Or so they call it.
Inflammation is infamous for a reason. It is a common thread that either causes or promotes the most prevalent and dangerous human diseases, from heart disease to cancer [1, 2].
But there’s another side to that story.
One that media often fails to present: without inflammation, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Just in case I need to spell it out: we’d both be dead. *sigh*
Inflammation is one of the most beautiful processes in biology; one that evolution shaped for the most ambitious of all jobs: to defend the body against (almost) every external harm.
And in the same way, it is also one of the most beautiful examples of how biological processes…
