Inflammation: An Enemy to Fight or an Ally to Respect?
Inflammation: How we are treat this disease
It’s becoming more and more frequent to see various advertisements in the media (newspapers, magazines, television, and radio) inviting us to use for an inflammation: anti-inflammatory, painkiller, and anti-diarrhea medications.
It is difficult to comprehend the scope at which the vast majority of doctors are prescribing these drugs for even the most mundane of processes. Obviously this mechanism has been influenced by pharmaceutical companies. The meaning of the medicine, the symptoms, and what happens in the body during a sickness has come to be completely misrepresented.
Is it a logical therapeutic practice to block a bodily process that forty million years of evolution has elaborated? Would it be logical to treat a muscle tear with an anti-inflammatory and immediately start running? Or would it be better to not strain the injury until it has healed?
No one disputes the effectiveness of these therapies and we see the result. People with a fever, pain, or constipation taking miraculous tablets and all of their symptoms quickly disappear. Society wants efficiency and our constant presence at all costs.
Inflammation: Do the effects of these treatments have consequences?
Although there is no immediate evidence, the systematic suffocation of the body’s natural responses leads to the continuation and increase of chronic and / or degenerative diseases. In practice, restraining the body from having a normal defensive response means preventing the complete elimination of the morbid stimulus. This forces the defense systems to elaborate a new balance, which is certainly less effective than the original, with inevitable movement from the acute and chronic towards degenerative diseases.
An analogy may clarify this concept: the elimination of a city’s waste happens by the contribution of an incinerator. When operated, the population is inconvenienced by smoke, heat, noises, and the nuisance of emissions. Similarly, the pain, discomfort, and distress of inflammation are byproducts of a necessary process.
Inflammation: Do we really think that by turning off it we are doing the best?
In the same way that turning off the incinerator would leave waste in the city to pollute the environment, turning off the inflammation with drugs leaves harmful toxins in the body. The situation is even worse if the pathological stimulus persists, because it forces the body to process a chronic inflammation. This unpleasant process is disabling and painful, but the best and only way to manage a morbid stimulus. If the waste continues to be produced, the incinerator will be forced to work continuously. In this case, the administration of an anti-inflammatory would be even more fraught with possible consequences.
All of this obviously doesn’t mean that this category of drug needs to be demonized. However, it must be clear that their use is contrary to the natural laws of the body. To face a machine as enchantingly complex as a living being, requires our compliance.
The anti-inflammatory should be an exclusively selected drug for those cases in which it is impossible to remove the cause of the inflammation or when it’s either unknown, unidentifiable, or not treatable in the correct way. Therefore, it should be used with extreme caution and an awareness of the effects that may result in the body.
Forza10 Founder and Head of SANYpet’s Research and Development Department Veterinary surgeon and international expert in food-borne diseases
