27/05/2025
Just putting the finishing touches on to May’s newsletter. A recent injury was a useful opportunity to reflect on how our understanding of the healing process has evolved during my lifetime. Our cultural view of the body is rooted in machine-like analogies, rather than the adaptive, biological system that it is. This can lead to the conflation of transient physiological events with persistent disease states. For example, high persistent blood pressure is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease. In the past, when someone had a history of myocardial infarction (heart attack), they were often advised to rest as much as possible, for the remainder of their lives, to avoid stressing the heart. Exercise can cause a temporary increase in blood pressure, but lowers average blood pressure by creating multiple adaptive changes throughout the cardiovascular system – avoiding this stress can perpetuate the progression of disease.
While there are many other examples (e.g. normal increases in blood glucose following a meal is not the same as persistent elevated glucose as seen in diabetes), this newsletter looks at how inflammation has been somewhat demonised, and how allowing the process of localised inflammation arising from an acute injury can facilitate more robust tissue repair.
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