It's hard to outsmart mother nature.

Just thinking about the human body today.....

Reports in the medical literature continually reinforce my belief that it's nearly impossible to outsmart mother nature in terms of the bodies inflammatory response. The inflammatory response is critical to your bodies compensatory mechanisms for stress or infection, but it has a tendency to go haywire and (apparently) make things worse. Billions of research dollars have been invested in characterizing (and manipulating) this cascade of biochemical processes. Every time we think we've figured out the big picture, eventually we are humbled by the bodies' "counter offensive".

In an international study (summarized awhile back here ) comparing bare metal versus the fancy new metal stents coated with medicines to inhibit re-occlusion of the artery showed dramatic increases in post procedural deaths as these patients were followed out from their procedure. When these drug-eluding stents were first introduced in 2003, they became the fastest-selling medical device in recent history despite being nearly 400% more expensive then the older bare metal stents.

We've witnessed a lot of similar outcomes in the trauma and septic response literature as multiple stages of the inflammatory cascade are suppressed or modulated, only to come back with a vengeance thru alternate "work around" pathways that must exist somewhere in the body.

When you see diagrams of what we think the immune response looks like, it is a frighteningly busy graphic. Despite millions of man hours in labor and billions of research dollars, complete understanding of these processes is elusive.

Rob