Inflammation is quickly becoming linked with just about every major disease and for good reason because it is the bodies natural response to injury and disease making the inflammation mechanism the bodies rapid response unit.

Inflammation is the bodies equivalent of the army, police, health and fire services rolled into one.

Once you realise that the bodies most natural response to infection is to either engulf the invader and destroy it or attach to it to warn others of the danger until help arrives you start to see the correlation with our emergency services. Similar is true of injuries, the specialist rebuilding cells within the body are attracted to the injury site and in conjunction with the blood itself and the lymph system start blocking off areas, shutting down leaking systems, taking away the waste and creating scaffolding so that rebuilding work can begin. This is also the kind of process the emergency services start and rebuilding services continue. To everyone else though it looks like a mess until everything is cleaned up and life can get back to normal.

The similarities do not end there, instead they go right through the process of recovery. The point though is that inflammation is not something to be avoided per se. As in, it’s not the problem, rather you always need to understand what causes the inflammation in the first place.

So far our medical response has been to dull pain and reduce inflammation. That’s fine but that’s the equivalent of fin turning off your fire alarm and opening the windows to let in some fresh air when there is a fire slowly smouldering in your house. Putting the fire out is the proper answer.

So now is the time I start to put the list together of what happens when inflammation isn’t controlled. This list is likely to get very long. When it does I can start to organise it into sub posts. For now it becomes somewhere I use to organise the topic because inflammation, the causes of and its resolution is rapidly becoming the biggest prize and challenge.

If you’ve been following me you will know that I believe I will eventually show you how being more active is one of the simplest and best ways to prevent inflammation. Building this list will help me do just that. For now. Let’s just see where this leads us. Maybe it’s not activity. Doesn’t matter, where the evidence leads is most important.

Osteoarthritis a Result of Inflammation as Well as Wear and Tea preventing osteoarthritis among other wear and tear issues is why I prefer to learn from my injuries to fix them and prevent future recurrence

Medical Xpress: How “good cholesterol” stops inflammation //bit.ly/1dpfbYI  thanks @everydaymornin via http://paper.li/everydaymornin
The depression-inflammation connection is a growing consideration in health. Emphasising the impact our immune response can have on health and disease.

Inflammation from uncontrolled sugar levels leads to the damage in diabetes and heart disease

Inflammation could be controlled via the vagus nerve Vagal Tone refers to the ability to control your vagus nerve which in turn seems to control your ability to relax. The stronger your vagal tone the better you are at relaxing. This is a potential goldmine of information for simple fixes to problems of inflammation

Further reading

• Mitochondrial molecule controls inflammation: Cellular organelles called mitochondria contain their own DNA and RNA. The molecule fumarate has now been found to trigger the release of these nucleic acids into the cytosol, aberrantly activating inflammation.