A Guide To Immune System Modulation
During the colder, and darker months of the year, the main thing that is often on our minds is our immune function. We either find ourselves in a prevention mode during this time, or we have already gotten unlucky and we are trying to speed up recovery. However, immune function is often quite misunderstood because it is an extremely complex system. When we are discussing immune function, we are oftentimes focused on the act of prevention. This act of prevention relies heavily on the innate immune system, rather than the adaptive immune system. Think of the innate immune system as airport security. The staff at airport security has many tools at their disposal to identify threats, and prevent those threats from inflicting serious damage. This approach is not very precise, yet it prevents most security threats that you would see at airports. Hopefully, airport security would catch most threats but based on the amount of staff at the airport and their skill level things could certainly be missed. For example, at an airport with a lack of adequate staff or worse yet, badly trained staff, the likelihood for a threat to make it past security is much higher. Thus, in order to increase security, proper training and staffing is paramount. The same can be said for our innate immune system, which acts as “security” for our body. We are constantly coming into contact with threats in our environments.