u/DrFuror

Spoiler alert, I am a physician. But that's not why I am pro vaccine.

In the second year of medical school, blending into the third year, most medical students begin to learn disease states, because they've just spent a year learning all about the body. They learn about sepsis. Sepsis is misunderstood as an infection overwhelming the body. Sepsis is your immune system killing you, and I will try to say this with as few clinical terms as I possibly can.

If you believe in evolution, long before you had a cortex in your brain and rational thought or a sense of self, like most surviving species on earth, you had a very primordial way to fight insults or foreign things entering the body. We all know red cells carry oxygen, while white cells are immune cells. The important thing is that they are just cells. Cells don't have brains, they behave according to chemical stimuli, and that's really as simple as I could make all of immunology. Yes, the type of cell released is changed depending on what kind of insult you have, whether it's a bacteria or whether it's a virus. But beyond that, it's not intelligent. If there is a chemical stimuli calling on your immune system, the immune system will respond. And it will take no prisoners. It will take everything. If it cannot kill what is infecting you, it will continue to fight until your muscles have wasted away, you are unconscious, you are filled with lactic acid, and one by one your organs, not having any more fuel, will stop working. That's why people with sepsis go to an ICU most of the time. It's so that we can feed and support the body systems while, if it is a bacterial infection ONLY (or fungal but that is usually a battle we lose), we try to kill the underlying intruder for you so that you can live. But you only live if the immune system stops. Has nothing to do with the antibiotic at all.

Now, let's talk about viruses. We have specialized treatments for a number of different viruses, like for example the drugs that can kill Hepatitis C very effectively. What we do not have a treatment for is the big infective viruses that cause the chemical cascade of your immune system to run in hyperdrive. Consider the common cold, flu, RSV, etc. yes, tamiflu is a thing, but all it does is attempt to attenuate the downstream response, and end your symptoms more quickly as your immune system kills the virus.

So. That's sepsis in a nutshell. I'm saying this because I found myself in a few conversations on a few different platforms over the years were people argued with me very stringently, and I don't like to argue.

The number one thing you can take from this is try to be healthy. As you get older, you have less organ efficiency, your muscles become weaker, you will be eaten faster by your own immune system if you get an infection. Stay topped up on your vitamins. Don't put up with bad labs on your yearly checkups. Make sure your sugars are good. A healthy person stands a better chance of leaving an ICU alive.

But the number two thing, which is equally important in medicine, is that prevention is worth an ounce of cure. Meaning that, any and all infections could put you at risk of a septic immune response. It would be crazy to think that the common cold could do that, right, but say you're a patient with advanced cancer on chemotherapy, and you don't even have enough to power a simple immune response...so you develop an insane imbalanced one.

So now we get around to my clickbait title. If you believe out there that vaccines are not trustworthy, that they have side effects, that they can influence the development of other disease states ... As your PCP I would never push you or argue with you. You are entitled to your beliefs and your own decisions as an autonomous adult. But I might tell you if you did ask that putting yourself at risk of dying because you're willing to get pneumonia, but not the pneumonia vaccine, to my mind, is a very imbalanced risk- benefit conversation. Let's say you had three kids under the age of 20, or even over the age of 20, and you want to be there for them. Don't get pneumonia, because I can't tell you that you getting pneumonia won't cause sepsis. You might die. The vast, vast majority of people will not die from a vaccine. Are there exceptions? Of course. But if you get pneumonia, your likelihood of septic transformation goes up as you age, and many many people die of pneumonia. I'm not saying go through life with fear, but if I offer you a way to prevent getting a disease, and you are going to stand on belief rather than ensure you don't get that virus or that bacteria, there is no prevention for sepsis.

Except not getting the infection in the first place.

Now, of course I'm am NOT talking about autoimmune diseases or other immunologic phenomena. Just sepsis.

I just want to clear this up and if you found this helpful I'm glad, I'm not karma farming. I just felt strongly about this today and wanted to share with all of you. Have a wonderful day.

If you come into the comments with anti-vax statements, I won't argue with you. Like I said, every adult is entitled to their autonomous beliefs. But for the people who do subscribe to my belief system, take this as validation and explanation.

Edit: oh and the ICU by itself is very very dangerous, not to say we are masters of the craft. There are hospital born infections that are resistant to most drugs. There is also the chance that your muscles and your nerves will die from lying in a bed. Your brain will stop working correctly. You might get delirium. None of that is worth it.