Dylan Scott

That is the weird allure of a lot of this wellness content on social media is because, yeah, it's quick.

It's whatever, a 90-second video.

It's digestible.

And they're like, here, here is the elixir, the solution that will help to reduce your chronic inflammation.

I think any of us would be like, well, that sounds appealing.

I'd like to try that out.

I completely agree with you.

Like, it's a very evocative term that gives you this image of your body being ablaze.

But I do think, like, fire is, I think, in some ways an appropriate metaphor for what inflammation does.

But I think we have to remember that, like, our relationship to fire is complicated.

Like, fire is certainly a destructive force at times, but it can also be a cleansing force.

Like, fire is natural, even like, you know,

Huge forests need fire sometimes to sweep through and clean things up and allow something new to grow on top of it.

And I think it's similar with inflammation, where we have a complicated relationship to it.

Some level of inflammation is absolutely necessary for our bodies to function as they should, but much like fire, too much of it can start to cause serious problems.

In essence, inflammation is your immune system going into attack mode and either sending immunity cells or other kinds of chemicals that your body can release to try to get rid of some outside invader that your body perceives as having infiltrated it and wants to get rid of to keep you healthy.

And so, obviously, if that outside invader is a cold virus or the influenza virus or some bacteria or something like that, that's what we call acute inflammation.

And that's something that we've known about for ages.

Even ancient doctors knew that the body goes into some kind of response when you get sick.

I mean, yeah, for this kind of acute inflammation that we're talking about in response to a virus or a bacteria or a wound, you know, back in the ancient times that you might've gotten on the battlefield or something, you know, the red skin or puffy skin that can surround a wound and like, it can be painful.