The Utter Annoyance Of The Balancing Act
Why, oh why must good things come in equilibrium?
We are familiar with the concept of extremes.
We know that there is only a range of temperatures that the human body can tolerate, and as such, it is unpleasant for us to be in environments that are too cold, such as it is in a tundra, or in environments that are too hot, such as it is in the desert.
If we do want to live in such environments comfortably, we’d have to introduce temperature control measures such as heating or air-conditioning.
Ditto for the settings in our body - the acidity is well regulated and balanced at equilibrium:
Our bones are in a constant state of dynamic equilibrium, as are our joints.
To understand chemical equilibria, we would have to look back a long time ago at high school chemistry and physics.
Newton’s first law of motion, which I did have to memorise as a teenager, states that
if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force.
And that’s the important thing to note here.
If I were to roll a ball along a flat, horizontal surface, it will eventually come to a stop. Even though Newton’s first law of motions will state that it will keep moving.
And that comes from the unseen forces of friction, which act as an opposing force on the ball - this causes the ball to come to a stop eventually, no matter how smooth or slippery we engineer the surface out to be.
And when the ball comes to a stop, it will be at rest - an equilibrium state where it is not in motion.
When we take our bodies for granted by feeding them with all the wrong ingredients, such as insufficient nutrition, sleep deprivation or chronic stress, we’d be adding extra “friction” to the situation.
While we may not necessarily die outright as a result of these poor lifestyle choices, we’ll find that our quality of life gets reduced over time.
It’s easier to develop health issues.
Our countenance tends to look worse for wear.
Heck, we might even start to age prematurely.
The problem is that this friction brings about an imbalance in the dynamic equilibria that we were experiencing, and assuming that it would go on uninterrupted for life.
Guess what - that assumption is completely fallacious.
Medical interventions, such as pharmaceutical drugs, are meant to control the rate of deceleration that the friction is providing, without actually dealing with the question of why there is that added frictional force that is throwing a significant wrench into the operational equilibria within the body.
As a result, when one process goes into disarray because of the additional frictional force thrown into a specific balance… we’d see the accelerated degeneration of a certain part of the body.
But scarily, what if the frictional forces thrown into one balance can affect multiple different balances?
How much more quickly would the body go into disarray?
One of those big problems is, of course, the idea of a dsyregulated inflammation mechanism, which, unsurprisingly, has its own balance and equilibrium, based on the forces of the pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine signalling networks.
Therefore, the idea to counteract or prevent most of these degenerative diseases is to work on the inflammation signalling mechanisms.
People will tend to say that we ought to “reduce” inflammation.
But that’s a unidirectional process.
What we want, really, is to achieve a balance between the pro- and anti-inflammatory signalling mechanisms, such that the inflammatory response is well regulated in the body.
That’s just me being more technically accurate!
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