INFLAMMATION is like the emergency services of the body. It goes to everything, a small cut, a broken bone, a bump on your head, to any injury or assault your body may have. That includes things like food poisoning where you get inflammation of the gut, basically anything that goes wrong in the body, inflammation turns up. So, it’s your ambulance crew and your fire crew and the police force all rolled into one.

Now, inflammation carries with it this massive arsenal or stuff to help your body get better. It’s got cells that will help rebuild, it’s got some cells that will help clear up stuff that is broken. It’s also got some chemicals that make the area painful, like police putting up a cordon around an area. So it’s everything that is needed to make sure you get better again.

The problem is inflammation can start turning up where it is not wanted. Imaging the emergency services just keep turning up at your house and barging in and cordoning it off, every time you turn the toaster on. Now that would be horrendously disrupting. You couldn’t live your life like that. You wouldn’t want to turn the toaster on, you wouldn’t want to do anything because you know that every time you do that, ambulances, fire crew, police, they all turn up and they cordon off the area.

So sometimes inflammation goes wrong, and that huge arsenal of stuff just keeps turning up in the wrong places. And it is understanding what triggers that inflammation to now be in a heightened state, so it just keeps turning up, that we can then start to dial down that sensitivity, so that when you put the toaster on, turn on the oven, or whatever……inflammation doesn’t come flying in trying to fix something that doesn’t actually need fixing.

Now that is the problem with chronic inflammation. With chronic inflammation we have this situation, where inflammation is turned up and it won’t go away, it just keeps staying, and actually it disrupts the normal cycle of what your body is trying to do. And on top of that, inflammation, as we know, causes pain, which is that cordoning off of the area. Now if we have chronic inflammation and pain, you’re not going to want to move or do anything. So, it’s about how do we dial down that sensitivity, so that actually the emergency services are only called out when you need it, when there is a fire in your house, or when something is broken or you’ve been burgled: then you need the emergency services but not before.

If you are struggling with chronic you might want to look into some foods (berries are great for this) or habits that could dial down that inflammatory response.  If you need any help with this then please do get in touch.  Your local friendly osteopath serving the residents of Farnham, Odiham, Church Crookham and the surrounding villages.