Imagine If We Could Look Inside Our Bodies
Care to take a tour inside your own body? No, I
don't suggest you do capsule endoscopy, you know, the one that takes pictures inside
your digestive tract? Or an X-Ray. Let's take the most sophisticated, hypothetical
tour, where you would be your own guide. What I have in mind might seem a bit
out-there, but picture this.
What if all of your organs were mini yous, running
their own departments, and dealing with each other's characters? Your body is a
complex machine made up of nearly 100 trillion cells. They're constantly
replicating, dying, and being replaced with new ones. You have five vital
organs that you can't live without, and a few organs that you don't really
need. And now you get a chance to meet them all. This is the head of the
circulatory department, and the hardest-working of all of your organs. Your
heart is a muscular organ that pumps blood throughout your body all day and all
night. It delivers oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to all parts of your body via
arteries, and receives oxygen-and nutrient-poor blood back via veins.
Your heart slows down when you sleep. But when it
gets signals of danger, it starts pumping blood faster, to deliver more oxygen
to your cells and tissues. But it doesn't work alone. It receives deliveries of
oxygen from your lungs, the head of the respiratory department. Oxygen in,
carbon dioxide out. Move it out! I don't need any of this waste in the
system."Do you hear this? That is your digestive system, two floors down, and
it's breaking down your lunch.
But before we get there, you've got to meet someone
upstairs. Your mouth is like an intern working for a few departments
simultaneously. It can cover for your nose and take in oxygen for the
respiratory department. And it also begins the process of digestion for the
digestive department. Then the food travels down through your esophagus, all
the way to the stomach. Your stomach produces gastric juice that breaks down
proteins, and kills off potentially dangerous bacteria. What used to look like
a yummy slice of pizza, turns into this paste, and is released into your small
intestine. This 6-meter-long (20 ft) organ absorbs all the nutrients from your
lunch, and sends them through your bloodstream and into the liver. Your liver,
true neat freak. It breaks down drugs, detoxifies all the harmful chemicals, and
sends them out of your body as waste. And it hates when you get drunk. And
these are the kidneys. Just like the liver, these guys are a couple of little
neat freaks.
They clean the waste and excess fluid from your
blood, and send all that stuff out of your body as urine. All these processes
are controlled from the command center, your brain. It has about 100 billion employees,
the nerve cells. And with their help, the brain sends and receives messages from
all the other departments of your body. Yep, your brain's got some control
issues. Everything has to be as it says. Then you've got some workers that
aren't that essential. Take the spleen. Hiding at the back of the ribs, and on
the left side of the abdomen, it essentially has the same function as the
liver. And here's another one, the appendix. It sits at the junction of the large
and small bowels, waiting to catch an inflammation from the intestine. That's
when you get appendicitis, and need to remove this sneaky organ from your body.
But most of the workers inside your body are
essential. They all come with their own set of responsibilities, and if they
fail, it's not good for the entire system. The defense department, your immune
system, looks into all the cells that enter your system. It's always ready to
attack bacteria, viruses, and parasites. But sometimes that's not enough, and
your body needs external help in the form of medication. Jokes aside, if you
could take a look inside your body any time you wanted, you'd be able to detect
if anything is wrong with it, and live longer.
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