THE IMMUNE SYSTEM: YOUR BUILT-IN DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
The immune system is one of the major components of your «doctor within.» To be immune is to be protected, to have resistance, to be exempt. That’s what your immune system is designed to do—protect you and give you resistance against disease. Your immune system is responsible for fighting off bacteria, viruses, fungi, cancer cells and other antigens (anything that challenges the immune system). It’s genetically programmed to swing into action as soon as disease rears its ugly head.
Germs are all around us, on us and in us. They’re on our clothes, in our food, in the air we breathe. If all it took to make us sick was for a germ to land on us, we’d all have died years ago. But we live, we thrive, because that part of our «doctor within» called the immune system maintains a constant vigil inside our body, always ready to destroy diseases before they harm us.
There are many parts to your immune system. You may have heard these names: T-cells, B-cells, phagocytes, complements, interferon, antibodies, interleukin. These are just some of the «immune warriors» your «doctor within» uses to fight disease. You can spend years studying the many fascinating details of the immune system, and I’ll tell you more about it in Part Three (page 215). But for now, the important thing to remember is that there is a powerful disease-fighting system within your body.
Many years ago, as a resident in Internal Medicine at Los Angeles County Hospital, I was in charge of the adult infectious-disease ward. For 10 to 15 hours a day, I was exposed to just about every infectious illness you can imagine. These patients had tuberculosis, meningitis, the very deadly septicemia and other dangerous diseases. They coughed and sneezed on me; I got their blood, sweat and even feces on my hands. But I didn’t «catch» any of their diseases. My «doctor within» kept me in perfect health.
Some time later, I was rotated out of the infectious-disease ward and into surgery. Months later I came down with meningitis, a potentially deadly infection of the covering of the brain. Why? None of the people I was treating had meningitis. I wasn’t near anyone with meningitis who could have «given» me the disease. What happened was that I was working double shifts, going to every class and lecture offered and moonlighting besides. In other words, I ran my immune system into the ground. Without immune-system protection I was «easy pickings» for any disease. If not meningitis, I would have «caught» something else.
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