Viraj's Weblog

Our lives are filled with constant battles against entropy. Entropy is randomness, disorder, chaos. Everything in your body is struggling to keep order. Down to the cell, it's purpose is to maintain structure. Throughout the day we are battling bacteria and infectious agents that aim to destroy that order without even realizing it. Our body tries to clean out any toxic substances we eat, and when our skin is cut there is a rush to restore order to the damaged area. When our bones break, what begins is a process to decrease entropy in the system and restore order.

When your body dies, all of its defenses are gone. It can no longer fight off organisms that would love to eat us. That's when the body decays. When you see an animal corpse rotting, you are seeing the defense system shut down. The pile of mass gravitates towards more entropy, to an equilibrium with the environment. That order in the body now must disseminate. What was order now becomes disorder. It's as if during life you are literally holding yourself together, and in death you can no longer hold yourself up.

It takes alot of energy to keep order, or reduce entropy. That's the food we eat, the fuel that powers our defense system.

It seems natural to think of disease as a form of entropy introduced into our system. Whether it be a virus or a cancer, that attack on our system destroys the order in our body bit by bit. Cancer is ultimately destroying the 'order' of our DNA. If our immune system is strong enough, we are able to restore order. If not, we die. We may throughout the day get cancerous cells and not even know it, because our immune system is smart enough to recognize such cancerous cells as damaged and rid them quickly before spreading.

As we age we become less able to keep the order in our system, and the entropy out. Our skin wrinkles, our bones weaken, we become more suceptible to diseases that we could fight off when we were younger.

It's really amazing just how much our body is doing constantly to keep us from literally falling to pieces.

But our body fights disease at the cellular level. Diseases aren't fought with the big picture in mind. Take AIDS for example. Here is a disease whose symptoms are literally a death from within. The immune system cannot fight the simple infections that any normal person could fight. The AIDS patient ends up constantly battling random diseases. The body doesn't know this. It sees one problem, say pneumonia, and fights that specifically, regardless of whether it was caused by AIDS or not. There is no 'big picture'. The body doesn't realize that its own immune system is what is damaged, and struggles to fight the symptoms.

If only the system itself could learn about the big picture. Sort of the body having an 'aha!' moment and being able to redirect its defenses to the true cause of AIDS, the virus that hides in cells going undetected. To learn how to make this detection. Obviously, doctors can take blood samples and 'detect' HIV. That's an outside 'brain' looking at a drop of blood and seeing a problem. How can we teach the body to do that? How can the body look at its own drop of blood and change its strategies?

I feel that the brain plays an integral part in fighting disease. If there is anything that can coordinate our defense system, that can know the 'big picture' and attack the right targets, it is the brain. I think we may underestimate the role the brain may play in fighting disease. There are cases of patients healing faster through laughter and a happy mood. Our mood can actually affect our recovery time from surgeries. Would the opposite be true as well? Would a depressed person heal slower or be more susceptible to disease? I don't think it is a far stretch.