Article re Switch that stops immune system attacking healthy cells

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Scientists Find 'Switch' That Stops Immune System Attacking Healthy Cells

HEALTH 20 March 2024

By DAVID NIELD


Our immune system is talented at telling the difference between the chemistry of our own body and that of an invading pathogen. When it malfunctions, our body can become host to an intense civil war.

Link to read article:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...Mre322HFj6qbs_jDfLnOu3AucxwNNa3kWahU1JbD-EPa8
 
links to an article equating illness symptoms with attention seeking

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-bo...-evolved-as-a-way-to-tell-others-we-need-help

Eliciting care
However, more recent theoretical research suggests something more: humans, in particular, are likely to show compassion to those showing symptoms of illness or injury.

There's a reason, this thinking goes, why people tend to exclaim when in pain, rather than just silently pull away from whatever is hurting them, and why fevers are linked to sluggish behavior.

Some psychologists argue that this is because immune responses are as much about communication as they are about self-maintenance. People who received care, over humanity's history, probably tended to do better than those who tried to survive on their own.
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"Some psychologists argue that this is because immune responses are as much about communication as they are about self-maintenance."

I suppose they're turning a blind eye to all the species that live without communicating with others of their species, but still have immune systems. Psychologists seem quite good at ignoring counterevidence. Maybe a psychologist should study that behaviour.
 
Creekside said:
"Some psychologists argue that this is because immune responses are as much about communication as they are about self-maintenance."
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What the heck do psychologists know about 'immune responses' or immunology. Not on my training or curriculum at any point.

What immunologists think about it, if they even have a view on such 'communication', might be of more value.....

Striking that my experience with immune deficiencies and discussing with my imunologist that trying to find anything, literally any way to improve or even change functioning in any objective, real world manner draws a complete blank. Zip. But here we have 'psychologists' proposing waffle like this :wtf:
 
It especially makes no sense that all of this evolved before language and complex communication was even possible. In addition to us being the only species that communicates. Illness that kills tends to leave no doubt that it's dangerous, it's only because of modern technology that this can happen, and obviously we evolved long before modern technology. Nothing in biology makes sense other than in the context of evolution.

It also ignores the obvious fact that illness obviously and knowingly causes people to retreat away from other people, in part because it's beneficial when members of a species do that, so that they are less likely to spread communicable diseases.

It's basically completely backwards. It's actually amazing to get things this completely wrong.
 
To explain my thinking in a little more detail.

At the point where they start to say...
immune responses are as much about communication as they are about self-maintenance
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I am concerned the quote above blithely assumes and overstates a paradigm which in the context of psychology can lead to concepts/wild hypotheses of hypochondria or even Munchausen's etc i.e. because of the ideas illness communication can become addictive due to the reward of compassion. Maybe it could in rare cases, but only rarely and it is not an explanation for ME though in the past PWME, especially young PWME, have been treated as though it was.

I think the quote loses the distinction between the physiological price of necessary immunological activity and the pain it causes and they way people choose to communicate about it.

The reason this is dangerous is they are fostering poor judgement from some clinicians who have in the past assumed that complaints from PWME are hypochondria and thrown them in swimming pools to see if they would swim etc.

This is why comparing communication of symptoms of illness with the very different category of fake injury behaviour of the ground nesting Killdeer bird or worse the fictional behaviour of detective superhero Sherlock Holmes is inappropriate, insupportable and is an example of a semi-scientific imagination run amuck. Heaven forbid that such fantasies should inform the professional approach.

This is why I comment as I feel this is very dangerous territory and I find the tone of the linked article insufficiently cautious about the terrible necessity of the immune response and reality of symptoms it creates in the battle for survival and the fine distinctions which must be made in interpreting what is due to this and how evolution may have shaped mechanisms for communication. I do not think their conceptual boundaries or assumptions are correct or safe.

In other words it is dangerously derpy.
 
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rvallee said:
In addition to us being the only species that communicates.
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Lots of other species communicate. Think of honeybees communicating direction and distance to flowers to their hivemates. Some birds seem to communicate fairly complex concepts. Even trees communicate through chemical messengers. It seems plausible that immune responses could be communicated to others of that species ("Foaming at the mouth: avoid!"), but that would be a side-effect. Immune systems evolved to counter threats, probably starting with organisms of only a few cells. I doubt that those little clumps of cells floating in the ocean did much communicating.
 
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