ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2006-03-02 13:35:00
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Medical language; medical metaphors; filksong...
Battle Hymn of the Human Immune System
[Tune: "Battle Hymn of the Republic"]


Now, the key to health is slaughter -- it sounds crazy, but it's true!
Be grateful that your Killer Cells are watching over you!
They're marching through your body parts with brutal work to do --
'Cause slaughter is our metaphor for health!


CHORUS:
Just remember: Health is slaughter!
Health is war and you're its border!
You're the mother of all battles and her daughter,
and slaughter is our metaphor for health!


Got bacteria in your kidneys? Is your throat all sore and red?
Got a fungus in your liver and a virus in your head?
Send a call out to your Killer Cells to come and shoot 'em dead,
'cause slaughter is our metaphor for health!

You thought you were a pacifist? I'm sorry -- that's not true.
There is ethnic cleaning going on nonstop inside of you.
When your cells spot something foreign they just beat it black and blue,
'cause slaughter is our metaphor for health!

Is there pollen in your nostrils, poison ivy on your hands?
Your mast cells will rush in with bombs in small marauding bands!
They're all in constant contact with your brain and its commands,
'cause slaughter is our metaphor for health!

There's something lurking in you -- there is something you could page;
it eats up all the corpses from the battles that you wage!
Its mission is to scavenge and its name is macrophage,
and slaughter is our metaphor for health!

You breed warriors in your marrow for your body's battlefields;
you train them in your thymus gland to be your body's shields.
Your neutrophils do suicides from your head down to your heels,
'cause slaughter is our metaphor for health!

Well, why we chose this image is a major mystery;
why fill ourselves with guns and tanks and field artillery?
We could have just had Gardener Cells out weeding you and me ......
But slaughter is our metaphor for health!

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[info]wilfulcait
2006-03-02 03:17 pm UTC (link)
I've been in cancer treatment; the slang for what they do is "poison, slash & burn." My husband and I joked that first we were throwing poisons over the barricades, then we were razing the castle to the ground, and then we were sowing the ground with salt.

At this point, though, I am singing little songs to my remaining cells, urging that they be calm and orderly and grow up to be nice and work well together. I guess after waging war I am hoping to wage some peace.

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[info]spider88
2006-03-02 03:56 pm UTC (link)
I honestly don't know of a better metaphor. Immunology is in fact a battle to stay alive. What better metaphor would work?

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[info]haikujaguar
2006-03-02 08:19 pm UTC (link)
I'm with you on this one.

You can't put a happy face on some things.

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[info]ashley_y
2006-03-05 02:34 am UTC (link)
As some random LJ user, I third the notion. Also my gardening mother has declared war on snails.

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[info]sunfell
2006-03-02 04:05 pm UTC (link)
It's the Good Bacteria versus the Bad Bacteria. It's a bit humbling to realize that I am simply a walking bacteria, virus and cell incubator, but the good ones keep me alive and kicking, and they kick ass against the bad stuff.

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[info]almeda
2006-03-02 09:15 pm UTC (link)
My husband insists that the entire purpose of life is to carry water uphill (since the water wants to see the view). Critters who do not do so efficiently enough die. :->

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[info]lumiere
2006-03-04 08:52 pm UTC (link)
How does your husband explain aquatic life?

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[info]sighkey
2006-03-02 06:09 pm UTC (link)
I don't think of my immune system as containing murderous soldiers - I think of it as legions of not exactly weeders (weeds are slaughtered just a surely when they are pulled out of the ground) but as a mixture of border patrols, and when those borders are breached, as transformers, encouraging the 'hostiles' to transform into something more benign. I don't use antibiotics because they tend to make me more ill than the bacteria they are meant to kill. Rest, liquids, and time take longer but are less toxic on the inhabitants within.

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[info]beckyzoole
2006-03-02 06:34 pm UTC (link)
This doesn't really make sense to me. Gardeners kill weeds just as dead.

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[info]jehannamama
2006-03-02 06:34 pm UTC (link)
I'm working with a child who is very ill, and we have been trying to teach her about her "pac men" and how they work and how she needs to take care of them better, (by eating and drinking and sleeping), so that they take better care of her.

I may just send her this... wow this is very cool...

I have a friend battling cancer also. If you don't mind, I think it's marvelous for another visualization tool. Thanks so much for sharing this... gosh, you rock!

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Response to jehannamama...
[info]ozarque
2006-03-02 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Please send it anywhere that you think it might be useful. And thank you....

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[info]metalfatigue0
2006-03-02 08:42 pm UTC (link)
This goes on my list of "songs I want to sing if I ever sit in on a filk circle," along with "Devil's Advocate Blues" by [info]feste_sylvain and "If I Only Were a Goth" by ThouShaltNot. (That is, assuming that you are granting a blanket license to perform it in public for free.)

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Response to metalfatique0....
[info]ozarque
2006-03-02 09:08 pm UTC (link)
I'm always pleased when people do my filksongs in public for free. For sure.

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sheepish ...
[info]almeda
2006-03-02 09:17 pm UTC (link)
I've been trying to spread 'The Seas of Space' really hard. I'm lucky in that folks usually know harmonies for the tune. :->

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[info]rabidsamfan
2006-03-02 09:05 pm UTC (link)
*snicker*

Yeah, the metaphor maters, doesn't it?

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[info]takumashii
2006-03-02 09:28 pm UTC (link)
What a great song! And particularly interesting to me because I just finished Scott Westerfeld's "Peeps," which goes into some detail about parasitology and immunology...

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[info]londonbard
2006-03-02 09:38 pm UTC (link)
This is wonderful! Please may I link to it?

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Response to londonbard....
[info]ozarque
2006-03-02 10:23 pm UTC (link)
Thank you. And yes, of course you may.

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[info]dteleki
2006-03-03 02:55 am UTC (link)
Sorry, I can't take seriously that this one is a problem with misleading language. The metaphor of [[Your body is a garden, and disease is the weeds]] is just too far removed from the particular facts that the [[war]] metaphor was created to explain.

Common cold viruses, fine, I'm willing to agree that those are weeds. The bacteria that cause boils, fine, those are weeds. Ordinary bacteria that decompose dead bodies of once-living things thus returning them to the environment, fine, those look like weeds if you're still alive and reasonably healthy. But, by contrast....

Smallpox, anthrax, mumps, measles, cholera, syphilis, polio, chicken pox, flu, bubonic plague, rabies, AIDS. The germs are an invading army. You have to kill them, kill them all, before they kill you. And they will kill you. The only way to stay alive is to learn to recognize them, and to annihilate them. [[Your body is a battlefield.]] If those invading organisms are permitted to live, any of them, they won't just overrun the garden, they'll kill the entire planet and kill the gardeners with it. [[Your body is a planetary ecosystem.]] [[Environmentalism is (?) a war to save a defenseless planet.]

Many micro-organisms are minor and harmless most of the time [[Your body is the mostly-inert landscape]] and some make valuable contributions e.g. the intestinal bacteria that synthesize B vitamins [[Your body is a community/nation/economy, and those bacteria are productive citizens]].

And many illnesses are not war. [[Diabetes is a malfunctioning thermostat.]] [[Scurvy is the lack of a nutrient.]] [[Starvation is lack of all nutrients.]] [[Allergies are unjustified and excessive xenophobia.]] [[Aging is (?) ordinary wear-and-tear of a complex machine with many moving parts.]] [[Fibrillation is a mathematical phenomenon commonly known as a "strange attractor".]] [[Aging is (?) errors introduced in copying a document, making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy etc.]]

Treating all illnesses as if they were wars is obviously a mistake. But thinking that war is an UNJUSTIFIED metaphor is just as much of a mistake. Lethal infectious diseases are more than just weeds in the garden.

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[info]gipsieee
2006-03-03 10:35 pm UTC (link)
Continuing the analogy, wouldn't type one diabetes actually be friendly fire?

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[info]dteleki
2006-03-04 02:34 am UTC (link)
I guess it depends on the analogy we're using. If it's [[disease is war]], then autoimmune diseases in general are friendly fire, or possibly civil war. Diabetes type 1 is closer to friendly fire (sporadic, targeted), lupus erythematosus is closer to civil war (diffuse, non-specific). Either one makes more sense to me for autoimmune diseases than [[your body is a garden, disease is the weeds]], with all the gardeners simultaneously collectively going insane and berserk, and yanking up the flowers along with the weeds.

I suppose the [[war]] and [[thermostat]] analogies could be combined in the idea that [[diabetes type 1 is friendly fire that takes out the thermostat]], but that's a bit more far-fetched than I feel comfortable with.

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[info]londonbard
2006-08-16 11:32 am UTC (link)
I've just seen this - and allergies are certainly friendly fire!

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-05 10:10 am UTC (link)
I hate my immune system. It made me diabetic.

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