I am at a hotel. Yesterday I decided to take a walk. A short distance from the hotel I started to walk uphill. It was surprisingly hard. I realized I was sick.
I think this is what happens when your immune system is working properly: Sickness stops being obvious. I think my immune system is working well because I sleep well and eat plenty of fermented foods.
I have never heard sickness described like this by anyone else. I have heard it described in terms of obvious suffering thousands of times. Which suggests a lot of room for improvement.
I remember thinking the exact opposite of this. When I was younger, getting sick was obvious: an intense experience of coughing, running nose, etc., which passes in a day or two. Now, in my 50′s, it seems there is some doubt, a general feeling of malaise that may last a week or two.
Aren’t the symptoms we identify as sickness mostly the reactions of the immune system? Might not their clear-cut appearance the sign of an immune system that is working well, and the absence of clear-cut symptoms a sign of a weaker immune system?
No, it’s not unheard of.
When I was spending a goodly amount of time cycling, I was measuring my basal heart rate every morning. It was a good way to tell if my system had recovered from the extra strain I had put it through after a day of training — if the basal heart rate was still elevated, I knew to take it easy to let my system settle down a little more.
An unexpectedly high basal heart rate, such as the morning after a non-training day, had to mean something else. It usually turned out to mean I was coming down with a cold or some similar illness. Other than that I was symptom-free for at least another day before I started getting snuffly.
I think malaise and obvious symptoms are different things– it’s possible to have either or both.
The only explanation of malaise I’ve heard is that it’s the liver sequestering iron to keep it away from bacteria, but I don’t know if it’s sound.
I view the immune system like a muscle that can be trained and strengthened, the longer one goes without getting sick doesnt mean your immune system is resting, it simply means its busy doing its job and doing it well.
i wonder if the longer you go without getting sick the stronger your immune system becomes, hence why the image of those 70 year old men who have never been sick in their entire lives are the product of a sort of self-propagating cycle of progressively stronger immune systems.
Seth, that’s an astute observation, but it does have precedent. Tom Minor, a psychologist at UCLA is involved in research on the role of sickness-induced depression. He says the cytokines play a role in regulating this behavior and that its function is to make sure you don’t exert yourself so that you can recover. He also said the neural circuit responsible for sickness-induced depression develops rather late in childhood which is why when little kids are obviously sick (fever, runny nose, respiratory symptoms, etc.) they still try to run around and play and act like they aren’t sick. They actually don’t have this neural mechanism yet and so they don’t feel “run down” like adults do when they have a cold/flu etc.
JBB, I made similar observations with doing the treadmill. If I could come close to my previous best I must be sick. In my case it didn’t progress to obvious sickness, it was the only clear sign.
Tim, you write “Might not [the] clear-cut appearance [of the symptoms we identify as sickness] be the sign of an immune system that is working well, and the absence of clear-cut symptoms a sign of a weaker immune system?” I read this idea in the New York Times a month or so ago. In my case, the shift from clear-cut symptoms to nearly-invisible symptoms coincided with much improved sleep. I think everyone would agree that better sleep should make your immune system work better (if anything) rather than worse. I believe the easily-visible signs of illness show that your immune system was slow to react or reacted too weakly at first. Because it was slow to react/weak at first, it had to ultimately do more. With a fast/strong initial reaction, it doesn’t have to do as much.
I haven’t had any obvious sickness in the last two years and your observations are the same as my own: brief, barely-there sickness; rare colds with hardly any nasal wetness but a sense of slight depletion, etc.
I think some of it is a matter of which diseases you happen to get. A couple or three times, I’ve had bad malaise going on for weeks with barely perceptible cold symptoms– and iirc, other people in my social circle had the same combination.
Other times, I get noticeable symptoms without much malaise, and there’s no obvious correlation with my general state of health.
This NYtimes article sort of concurs with you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/opinion/05ackerman.html
thehova, you write: “This NYtimes article sort of concurs with you”. I wonder who you mean by “you”. I disagree with the main point of that article, which is that having a stronger immune system causes more cold symptoms. As I said, I believe if your immune system is working better it will jump on the invading viruses before they replicate a lot and suppress them with little fuss and few visible symptoms. It’s when the immune system is weak (= slow to respond) that you end up with massive symptoms. Because by then you need a massive response to get rid of the virus.
ok, yeah.
But you both agree that symptoms from a cold stem from the immune system and not the cold itself…..right? I’m guess most people don’t understand that.
Well, as a result of evolution, virus fragments in our blood make us tired. So if we get sick and then feel tired (because our immune system has destroyed some of the viruses), is that from “the cold itself” or “the immune system”? But yeah, our immune system is big and well-connected with the rest of the body. The viruses are tiny and unconnected. It follows that visible changes are much more likely to be due to the huge thing (the immune system) than the very tiny thing (the viruses).