Getting an infection is not a “flex.”

Welcome back to medical school. Let's talk about something really important. Your immune system does not act like a muscle. Your muscle gets stronger when you stress it. Your immune system is more like a memory bank. It's something that you teach. When you get an infection, your body's first-line response is typically your innate immune response. It is fast and most importantly, it's non-specific. All cylinders on go. Your temperature rises to slow down the replication of whatever is invading your body, mucus increases to trapped pathogens, even cytokine messenger proteins are sent around your body. This is what makes you feel like crap when you're sick. Your body does not know what it's fighting, but it's going to fight for your life. Imagine me in this room right now. Put a blindfold on me and I'm just swinging. I'm going to take out someone and I'm going to make sure I get out of this room alive. That is what your immune system is doing when you get that first response to an infection. Now for most infections, your body will be successful, but there are some infections and we have evidence where your risk is substantial. I'm getting out of this room, but the chances of me getting harmed before getting out of this room are very high. We'll use polio as an example from the data that we have 90% of the people who get polio or who have gotten polio were asymptomatic, meaning they have no symptoms at all. Their bodies were successful at eliminating the threat. But for a small percent of people who get infected with polio, that virus moves out of the gut where it likes to replicate and multiply and into the spine where it causes paralysis. Before 1955, before the polio vaccine was licensed, there were nearly 20,000 cases of polio paralysis every year. Playgrounds empty, public pools close, and the modern ICU that you see in the hospital, the ICU, was created as a result of polio cases. If you survived that infection, your body collects that information about what that infection looks like and creates an adaptive immunity. This is your immune response that is specific. In the event that you come across that type of infection, again, your body knows what to do. Your immune system gets smarter by storing that information in a memory bank. Some viruses, if they're left uncontrolled, can get into that memory bank and delete it. This is one of the complications of measles. It can cause something called immune amnesia. Measles can actually make your body forget how you fought prior infections, making you susceptible to disease. And some infections can leave you permanently harmed before you get out of this room. For example, hematluis influenza is another preventable infection. And before the vaccine for it was licensed in 1985, there were at least 20,000 invasive cases of hematluis influenza. A complication of this is encephalitis, and one in four children who get that are left with permanent brain damage. And some infections, like the blue, can change what they look like to evade your adaptive response and leave you fighting for your life every season. Each infection isn't a workout, it's a risk. And vaccines give your immune system a lesson without the life-threatening consequences. This allows your immune system to learn through safe practices without the danger of trial and error. Important to acknowledge, there are rare risks associated with vaccinations. Every intervention of medicine has some level of risk. But vaccines are actually one of the most studied interventions with them medicine, because they are interventions that are given to healthy people to keep them healthy. The data behind vaccines goes miles beyond the majority of the medications that you might be prescribed or a disease or disorder, and way beyond any supplement that you might grab over the counter. Let's talk about supplements in another video. And your risk of exposure to one of these diseases, at some point in your lifetime or your child's lifetime, is almost certain as we live in a globally connected community. But this is what misinformation does. It downplays the real risk of disease, it exaggerates the rare risk associated with vaccinations, and it leaves you confused and fearful and more likely to choose a decision that is a higher risk option for you. So when you're making important decisions about your health, make sure you choose a qualified professional who has verified clinical experience that can back up their statements with data. Because without data, they're just giving you random opinions that you don't need. All right, talk soon.