The body is the hero 

   Those tremendous volumes give us the ability to run, to keep enough oxygen and sugar moving to our legs and arms so that our muscles can move even after hours of continuous effort.

But the price we have to pay for all this quickness and power is a severe one.

A bacterium from a cut in your finger can reach your brain in a little over four seconds.

A pneumococcus in your lungs can reach the bones of arms in three seconds.

   With a circulatory system such as we have, we certainly need protection.

And it is there: a group of chemical protectors and microbial killers so quick and so powerful that, in spite of our size, our circulatory system, and all our human mistakes, we survive.

   This remarkable system of protection is within us. It is provided by the antibodies that patrol our circulation, by the white cells and lymphocytes that guard our tissues, by all the other elements that make up our body’s immune system.

   To cure a disease you must help the body to do it itself. The work is done by the body, not by science, not by antibiotics. Antibiotics only buy time. They fight microbes, they retard their growth, they may even kill a few; but in the end it is the body itself that must clean up the battlefield, find and destroy that last resistant microbe.

   All the drugs and technical achievements in infectious diseases have done nothing more than help the body’s own immune system.

They give us time, the precious time to mount a defense, but nothing more. The body is the hero.

(Adapted from The Body Is the Hero, Ronad J. Glasser, M. D., Random House, New York, 1976) 

What part of the human body is especially important for our protection against microbes?