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Depending on where you live, you can keep your home secure in many ways. Some apartment buildings use doormen. Some houses have fences. Got a castle? One moat and an arrow-flinging army, please. Or you can choose other typical home-defense mechanisms, like deadbolts, electronic security systems, or a frothing pit bull named Rocco. No matter what your barrier method, there’s a reason why you punch in a pass code, chain the door, or opt against neutering Rocco. You want a top-notch security system to protect all the valuables inside your home—from photo albums and stereo equipment to heirlooms and children.
All throughout your body, you also have your own security systems to defend your body against intruders. Skin and bones protect your internal organs in car accidents and from errant golf balls, hair protects your scalp from UV rays, and eyelids protect your eyeballs from finger-poking friends. But the most important security system in your body is the stealth one—the one that you can’t see or feel, but the one most responsible for protecting you from invading illnesses and for helping you recover from them.
You use your immune system every day, though you may not even know that it’s working or how it works. Your immune response kicks in when it senses something evil lurking around your body, like bacteria or viruses. When you consider the fact that your hand alone may contain germs numbering 200 million (the U.S. population in the late 1960s), it’s likely that your body is infected with bacteria right now, and the cells in your immune system are currently working their little fannies off to fight them.

Perhaps the reason why immune diseases are so complicated is that there’s such a wide range of things that can cause infections in our bodies, so many ways our bodies respond to them, and such difficulty figuring out how to beat them. While it’s easy to know when to stitch a cut or place a cast to stabilize a broken bone, immune problems have a wide range of solutions (medications work for some and not for others, for example). And that makes your immune system one of the more complex ones in your body.

Your body’s cells are a little like your taste buds in that they know exactly what they like and what they don’t. When it encounters staphylococcus, your body recognizes it as a foreign substance, just as a guard would notice an unwanted intruder on a surveillance camera. When your body spots the intruder, a type of white blood cell—called a macrophage—finds the bacteria, engulfs it, and digests it, sort of like the way the security guard would stop and question that intruder. At that point, the macrophage gets on its walkie-talkie and calls for backup. The message—the chemical equivalent to “Help! Help! Intruder! Pimple forming on tip of nose! Prom’s tomorrow night!”—is an SOS to other cells so they’ll immediately respond to the area by traveling through the bloodstream (that’s why skin beneath a scab is red—it’s made up of the additional blood supply).
At the same time, the macrophage takes down information about the foreign cells so that the immune system can recognize it. Essentially, that information is what puts the bacteria on your body’s Most Wanted List, as the macrophages let other cells know what to attack. As all of this information is being relayed, the backup immune cells are starting to arrive on the scene of the infection. They’ll look for the code—the mug shot—to identify and obliterate harmful bacteria. As you can see in Figure 9.2, the immune cells attack in different ways. The T cells directly attack and digest the offending bacteria, while the B cells create immunoglobulins that act like bullets and blast through the covering of the bacteria.

That’s how the immune system is supposed to work, but it doesn’t always run as smoothly as that. Just as there are different threats to your home—from neighborhood egg throwers to silver-seeking burglars—there are different levels of immunity threats to your body, as well as different ways your security system reacts to those threats. And your immune system seems to be less effective as you get older if you do not take care of it. As you age, your ID system becomes full, and some of the older information gets deleted so that you have space for information on recent intruders. Your B cells also slow down or malfunction, leaving you less powerful to fight bacteria as you age. Another obstacle: There are also crooked cops in your immune system—cells that go out and destroy good cells, rather than the bad ones.
Because immune diseases can come in the form of the short-running common cold to chronic diseases like AIDS, it takes some understanding of your body to know how to confront an immune problem. In 1991, for example, Grammy Award–winning singer Naomi Judd was diagnosed with a virus that affected her liver—hepatitis C. It changed her life instantly. Judd, who contracted it while working as a nurse when she was stuck with an infected needle, had been healthy her whole life. Originally told she’d have three years to live, Judd told herself to fasten her seat belt and hold on because it was going to be a bumpy ride. She decided that she could either roll up in a ball and accept what she was told or raise her hand and start asking questions. Deciding that this was her body and that she should control how she felt, Judd prayed, stayed calm, asked a lot of questions, and took an experimental new drug that, like an extra set of lawmen providing reinforcements and a new attitude to a Wild West town, helped her immune system gather strength and attitude to fight the virus. Now years later, she’s cured—the virus has vacated her body. While hepatitis C can be a deadly disease, Judd’s story is an important one because it shows not only that you can have some say in how you respond to illness, but also that there is a powerful interrelation between mind and body.
By no means does that mean that you can just prevent a cold or will away a pimple (enough tenth-graders have tried that). But it does show that your immune system is one that can be affected by so many different things—including a positive attitude. Before we explain the ways that you can upgrade your own security system, let’s take a closer look at how this intricate department of defense really works.

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