The Immune system

How the immune system works

Our immune system recognizes and destroys anything foreign to the body, including cells like bacteria and other microbes and foreign particles including toxic compounds.

This recognition and destruction is performed by cells in the circulatory and the lymphatic systems. These cells are produced in the bone marrow and lymphatic tissue (thymus, lymph nodes, spleen and tonsils) respectively. The cells begin their lives as “Stem Cells”. These cells are so featureless that there is no way to determine what types of cells, one of which is called “memory cells”.

Memory cells, as the name implies, remember specific foreign cells or chemicals to which they have been exposed, and react immediately when they are next exposed to those compounds. Drugs which affect the memory cells stimulate immunity only to one disease or antigen.

Vaccines are an example of drugs which effect memory cells. Most herbs for the immune system do not affect memory cells, but are general immune system stimulators (immunostimulants). They increase the activity of the immune system but are not specific to a particular disease or “antigen” (a protein against which immune cells act). Rather, they increase resistance by mobilizing “effector cells” which act against all foreign naturally against infectious agents, without the drawbacks of antibiotic therapy. While immune stimulants cannot replace antibiotics in some cases, they have proven far superior in others partices, rather than just one specific type (that is a measles virus).

Remarkably, since the discovery of penicillin, our scientists, in search of drugs against infectious disease, have looked only for chemicals which kill bacteria or viruses. Finally, they are coming to realize that it is possible to boost the immune system, which can then fight off and defend the body the way it was made to do in the first place.