On Symptoms – A Review

When you have a fever, that’s your body increasing your internal temperature to make it less hospitable for germs. When you sneeze, cough, vomit, or sweat, that’s your body ridding itself of toxins. Well. Kind of.

When we’re sick, the first thing we do is look at the symptoms. We measure the body’s reaction to the illness. We hold up a mirror to ourselves, not what’s causing the sick. But what the sick is causing in us.

These immune-responses, like a runny nose, come mainly from swelling. Which, from my research, was called “an archaic function” on multiple occasions. And is why we can take medicine without “prolonging” our illness.

As a society, we have decided that white blood cells, antibodies, and the like will fight off infections whether you’ve got a headache or not. So, we offer Tylenol and DayQuil to deal with the weird things our body is doing. Sneezing, runny noses, and clogged sinuses, like I said, mainly stem from swelling. The swelling starts because your body needs to send more blood to more places to deal with the infection, so it widens your blood vessels. It’s not because your body is trying to “get the toxins out.” It’s because your body is trying to send more things to the toxin. The swelling causes already present mucous to move throughout the body. Like to the throat, or the lungs, or to the stomach. Giving us a sore throat, a chronic cough, or nausea.

The germ isn’t making you sneeze. The bacteria isn’t giving you a cough. Your body is.

The Dayquil isn’t fighting the infection, so much as it’s fighting your body.

Well, that’s kind of charged vocabulary. It’s not “fighting” your body, but it is convincing your body not to do such dumb things.

This strange irony, for whatever reason, is interesting to me.

There are many different avenues outside of internal medicine where this concept lives. So much policy is defined by treating symptoms rather than problems because we as people are rewarded for reacting rather than proacting (that’s actually a word? Woah). But sometimes problems can’t sort themselves out. And we’re stuck working on addressing symptom after symptom, never getting to the root issue.

Which, if we’re going to throw the word around, I would call pretty archaic.

And sure. This is clearly marked as being a societal issue. But we know each other. We can get personal here.

We’ve all lived with something that was killing us, but refused to put up with the symptoms. We try to adapt, to treat and change, but more and more problems spring up. And soon we’re too focused on the cough to notice the gaping wound in our side.

Sometimes, that’s necessary. Sometimes the thing that’s killing us is an obligation to avoid being crushed under some greater evil. And sure, we can treat symptoms forever, but is that a way to live long term?

I don’t know if anyone can be sure. But. The infections I do know, have got to go. Because rent is expensive, and unless this virus pays up, I can’t afford freeloaders anymore.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!