IF YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM IS OUT OF WHACK, SO IS YOUR WHOLE BODY
A healthy immune system is vital to help your body shield itself from harmful bacteria, viruses, and toxins you may encounter every day and that can make you sick. The job of your immune system is to keep you alive and healthy. It does this by attacking foreign invaders or going after cells created within your body that could endanger your life, like COVID, pneumonia, AIDS, meningitis, arthritides, cancers, tuberculosis, flus, and the like.
Your immune system is constantly interacting with all your bodily systems to keep you safe. You’ll notice you begin to feel symptoms, like fever, swelling, and runny nose when viruses and bacteria enter your body. In this example, white blood cells are activated, the hypothalamus — the master switchboard of the brain — which controls the endocrine system is activated as well, and so is the respiratory system.
White blood cells begin to increase effecting your hypothalamus into heating up your body to attack the infection by producing fever. As you may know, fever makes the body less favorable to host viruses and bacteria, which are temperature sensitive. In like manner, swelling helps recruit healing factors to accelerate quick recovery from inflamed tissue. A runny nose can be a response to hay fever and pollen being inhaled. Here the respiratory system is stimulated when affected people are sensitive to environmental allergens. If ongoing allergies are not treated effectively, it’ll affect other parts of your body like a domino effect. It could weaken your immune system making you more susceptible to viruses and bacteria that may lead to sinus problems, and ear and upper respiratory infections.
The immune system is constantly watching over every system in your body. It works closely with the circulatory system to transport white blood cells that fight off infection and the lymphatic system to produce lymphocytes, T cells and B cells that produce antibody molecules that can latch on and destroy invading viruses or bacteria. In addition, your immune system uses your integumentary system (your skin) as its first line of defense against invading pathogens. That’s right, your immune system works hard to keep you alive and vibrant.
Other bodily systems have tasks too. Together with the immune system, they must maintain homeostasis. That is, they must keep your body in balance, necessary for everyday living.
We, humans, are complex beings and must maintain a core set of necessary life functions to survive. These include maintaining boundaries to separate our internal environment from the external one; having movement to propel our body and allow us to move from one place to another; being responsive to sense changes in the environment and respond to them; digest food and absorb its nutrients into our bloodstream; convert what we eat and drink into energy; get rid of waste and nonessential items from our body; reproduce for the survival of the human species; and grow in order to survive.
Our bodily systems are a set of connected parts forming a complex whole. It is an organized method of carrying out the functions of our body to maintain a relatively stable equilibrium between the interdependent systems that maintain our physiological processes. Survival is our body’s must important job! And it depends in our body maintaining or restoring homeostasis, a state of relative constancy of its internal environment.
