Have you ever heard someone say, ‘I’m so healthy I never get sick.’?
Let’s talk a little bit more about this because a person who never gets sick isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes what can be happening when a person never gets sick is an infection can be coming into the body and the immune system is not mounting a response to that infectious agent, so we have no symptoms. Infectious agents can be coming the body and can be causing problems within the body that we aren’t aware of, or they can be coming into the body and staying dormant and won’t express themselves until years later, often called stealth infections, can be causing low-grade infections within the body leading to problems down the road.
So sometimes what can be happening is that infections can be coming into the body, and the immune system is not working effectively, so it doesn’t mount that response, then our systems are overtime becoming weaker. Therefore sometimes it is not a good thing when a person says that they are so healthy they never get sick.
What is actually a healthy response is if you come across an infectious agent and you get a little bit of sniffles and a bit of a sore throat, maybe for a short period of time, then your immune system mounts its response and that infection is completely gone. So your body has responded but you haven’t ended up with a full blown cold or you haven’t been laid out sick for a number of days or weeks. So this would be a sign of a healthy immune response, but a person who doesn’t get sick at all is not necessarily a healthy response. There is potential that their immune system is suppressed and you are actually ending up with a low-grade infections in the body or stealth infections which may show up years down the line.
This is something that I will often explain in my clinic because I will have patients that will be diagnosed with a chronic disease like cancer and they will say that ‘they are so surprised that I have cancer because I NEVER get sick. I’m the person who never gets colds or flus, so I’m surprised that I ended up with cancer, because I am typically the healthy person when a cold is going around.’
