"Nature is cruel, but fair" … "The strong devours the weak" … "You have to pay for excesses" … These formulas have eaten into our minds better than the Ten Commandments, they write in their book "Why are we sick? Evolutionary Medicine Answers”Randolph Nesse and George Williams. But not everything in life is subject to clear, inexorable laws of being.
For example, diseases. They attack us suddenly. We go over the past in our memory and cannot understand how and why we got sick. Ailments seem to strike without any logic. They spare old people and destroy babies. But is it really so?..
Specialists of a new scientific discipline - evolutionary medicine - will help to understand the secrets of our suffering. The search takes them far into the past, forcing them to remember the formation of Homo sapiens.
As a matter of fact, their method is not new. For a long time, anatomists, peering at their contemporaries, find signs of ancient times - rudiments. So, we wear a light hair coat in memory of the animal wool that once covered the bodies of ancient hominids, protecting them from the cold. The tail vertebrae seem to be the same remnants of the past, for none of the people wears a tail for a long time. So maybe many of the diseases that are killing us now have come to us as an unkind memory of the past?
Usually we meet ailments fully armed. Our body is made up of about ten quadrillion cells. Each of them is provided with a chemical tag. This sign is like a passport or a uniform. If there is one, it is immediately clear that we are faced with a "subject" of a huge "organism-state". If he is not there, then an outsider, an alien, a stranger has made his way here, and the reprisal with him is short-lived.
In this society, draconian laws reign: the death penalty immediately follows for wearing a fake or sloppy tag. Every hundredth cell of our body works in this "security service": it tracks, controls, straightens, and puts things in order. Our entire body is under her vigilant supervision.
Otherwise it can not be. After all, an organism is a state that continuously wages a war with enemies penetrating from the outside. The situation is akin to that described in his dystopia "1984" by George Orwell.
Promotional video:
And yet we do not recognize some ailments point-blank. Two conclusions suggest themselves. Or this disease began to annoy the human body many thousands of years after its appearance, and he did not supply any weapon against its pathogens. A vivid example of this: the general extinction of the Indians of North America from unfamiliar and, in our opinion, not very dangerous diseases brought to them by Europeans.
Or - another conclusion - these diseases have played a positive role in the history of mankind. They were somehow useful for the ancient man, and therefore we, his weak descendants, suffer and suffer, not realizing that one should not swear "this misfortune" like that. She is a weapon that protects us from more dire ailments.
Perhaps many of our ailments saved our family during it? And then it would be right to call them not "a scourge that stings people", but a rusty weapon of evolution.
Let's try to consider both of these options. Let's start with the insidious enemies creeping towards us from the side from which the sentries are not posted.
The disease of the 20th century, as already mentioned, was cancer. Harmful tumors are ready to gradually affect almost any organ of our body. And we? We don't even know exactly how cancer occurs. Our body, which violently reacts to a mild cold, at first simply does not notice that a tumor has nestled inside it - like a bird does not distinguish that a cuckoo has settled in its nest.
We sound the alarm only when the disease becomes incurable. What's the matter? Probably, the fact that in ancient times people rarely had cancer.
Obviously, only people who lived up to the Mafusailic age suffered from cancer before. And since there were very few of them and many generations died young, nature did not even take care of warning signs - symptoms that would immediately suggest the appearance of a tumor. But when the average life expectancy increased sharply, cancer fell upon us - once an ailment as exotic as, for example, cystic fibrosis.
Now let's turn to another option - to the fact that “useful, expired” begins to harm us rather than help.
A hundred thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens inhabited the African savannas, he did not fly on a shaking airplane, did not sail on a ship in a storm or calm, and did not even ride a merry-go-round to the joyful laughter of his relatives. Meanwhile, on the deck of a ship, in the cabin of an old plane and during an attraction, we are often numbed. The poor sufferer is literally turned inside out. An attack of "seasickness" is painful, even though you cannot count it as a real ailment. Why does our body react so violently?
Because the vestibular apparatus suffers. We lose our orientation in space. What did this mean in the days when there was no aviation or navigation? That poison got into the body! Our ancestors, who did not get into transport alterations, were sick only when they ate something poisonous. The body then as quickly as possible vomited eaten, hoping to escape from toxins. And now, as soon as we get on the deck of the quivering ship, the body is trying to repeat the old experience that helped the ancestors.
This is the case with bad habits. It is believed that being fat is bad. Parents discourage children from crunching buns, potato chips, fluffy hamburgers and sweet Coca-Cola, knowing once and for all that adding calories, we take away health. But children are still drawn to forbidden food and are capricious. Something deep, subconscious prompts them to eat contrary to science.
The answer must be sought again in the past. During the Ice Age, human food was constantly lacking in fats, carbohydrates and sugars. The diet was very poor. In the long, harsh winters, people were weakened and died from lack of nutrients. You could save yourself by getting something very nutritious, rich in calories. This is how the craving for food has taken root in us, helping to work up fat.
By biological standards, the ice age ended "just a few days ago." We have not yet had time to break the habit of not passing a piece by our mouths. Diets don't help. After sitting on them, we most often immediately "wake up" and again begin to gain weight, involuntarily eating "for ourselves and our ancestor." It is better to understand the futility of trying and calm down. A well-fed person tolerates adversity more easily. Thick-skinned optimists cannot be defeated.
So, we often decide for ourselves what constitutes a disease. For any state we experience is somewhat different from the ideal and, therefore, is unfavorable. Do we need to be constantly healed? Of course not. In many cases, what we understand by "illness" rather reveals our self-esteem, our wish for ourselves ("I want to be slim and have a magnificent head of hair!"), And does not at all indicate a dangerous violation of body functions.
So, not everything that seems to us a disease must be treated without fail. Between the heme, in other cases, doctors are fighting with the person himself. Depression can be treated with pills until the patient dies or "gets on wheels." In other cases, doctors, to please us, take to treat the symptoms without getting to the disease itself.
Pharmacists are especially guilty of this when they strongly advertise pills and potions that "suppress coughs", "bring down fever", "relieve a cold." You can just as well be assured that an umbrella raised above your head "gets rid of the rain." Your head, indeed, will remain dry, but your feet will continue to pace through the puddles.
Fever, cough, runny nose - all these are symptoms of the battle taking place in the patient's body. And if the sounds of the slaughter are painful for you, you can arm your allied army with cardboard swords - take a newfangled pill. All signs of strife will disappear, but the army will be defeated and the disease will prevail!
Temperature is the same sword that your body has used. The temperature rises because many bacteria and viruses do not tolerate even a small increase in temperature. As long as there is heat in your body, the enemies that have penetrated into it die in droves. By taking some kind of fever-lowering agent, you will help them, give them a break, and then, lying in a hospital bed, you will wonder why you have such poor immunity.
Coughs and runny nose are also our weapons. We throw microbes out so that they do not multiply inside us, poisoning the body. If we, having swallowed something from the current "miraculous remedies", immediately get rid of a cold, then in reality we will only put the body at the mercy of the disease. We will close the door through which he could drive out his enemies, and they begin to destroy us with a vengeance.
A violent reaction increases the chances of survival! So be on your health.
From the book of S. N. Zigunenko. "100 great secrets of medicine"