Dr. Giulia Enders

Often you have this like paracetamol, ibuprofen is sort of like your twin drugs you can take.

Are you as relaxed with the ibuprofen as you are with the paracetamol?

It's a freedom of choice, I would say at this point.

I don't have a preferred one to advise and people usually have one.

So they say I react better to that and that and then I would always go with this.

I was thinking back to what you were saying before about rethinking the immune system.

I tend to think of the immune system as being sort of permanently at war.

It's constantly fighting against all these things in our environment in order to keep ourselves safe.

Is that the right way to think about it with all our latest understanding of what's going on?

Well, yes and no.

There is this part of the immune system that really has to do all these things to keep unwanted microbes and stuff out.

But then it's also in a way kind of old fashioned, to be honest, because we've had this research about like invaders and killer cells and so on in like times of the First and Second World War, heavily influenced by the war lingo.

And partly it fits what's happening there, but for some other parts and actually quite large parts, it's not.

And we have known like for a few decades now that the immune system is also really trying to keep us safe through other routes than just war and fighting.

It is keeping us safe through, for example, cooperating with good microbes, which is a very important part because if they take up a lot of room, there's not so much room left for bad germs to land, you know.

It is saving a lot of energy by not initiating unnecessary inflammatory reactions by tolerating and just, you know, nurturing tolerance in order to have just microbes sitting there that don't do anything bad.

That they are okay.

Maybe sometimes they're a bit funky, but that's not a problem.

And all of this it can only do because it constantly asks us how we're doing, gets to know us all the time.

is curious and learning and builds a memory and, you know, has all these experiences.