"Enquire further, and it doesn't get any easier to pin down. The year prior, another doctor, reading a pathology report, told me: 'Good news - this biopsy isn't endometriosis or cancer, it's just non-specific chronic inflammation.' When I asked what that meant, they suggested I check with the pathologist. The pathologist, in turn, explained that she had simply classified the tissue according to the textbook."
"Unlike chronic inflammation, the kind of acute inflammation described in medical textbooks has a long and stable history. In Western medical culture, it has been understood as our essential healing response to injury or infection - 'the body's unique mechanism to maintain its integrity in response to macroscopic and microscopic injuries,' as the health psychologist Jeanette Bennett and colleagues put it. From a sprained ankle to an infected cut, acute inflammation is the main reason our bodies respond and recover."
Inflammation appears frequently in clinical encounters but often carries different meanings. Clinicians may label tissue as 'non-specific chronic inflammation' or classify samples according to textbook criteria, leading to varied explanations. Patients commonly face uncertainty about causes, chronicity, necessity of treatment, and whether inflammation worsens with stress. Acute inflammation is a well-established healing response to injury or infection, involving activation of immune and non-immune cells and characterized traditionally by redness, swelling, heat, pain, and loss of function. Scientific advances in microscopy, cell biology, and immunology have refined understanding of inflammatory processes.
Read at Aeon
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