In the “healthy immune balance” example,
your firefighters respond to a four-alarm fire.
They fight the blaze, head back to the station,
and have time to clean up and do some low-
level repair and maintenance before they’re
expected to go all out again. In this situation,
your firefighters (immune system) ramp way
up for the fire (acute inflammation from
traumatic injury, infection, etc.), but once the
fire is out, immune activity decreases,
allowing for repair, recovery and maintenance
tasks to be performed.
This is normal, and represents a healthy,
balanced response. Your immune system
needs an “on” switch to be able to ramp up to
a threat, but it also needs an “off” switch in
order to allow for recovery and have the time
and resources to complete important repair
and maintenance chores.
In the “chronic systemic inflammation”
example, however, as the firefighters are
winding down from the acutely stressful and