Our Health Is About Maintaining Multiple Stages Of Dynamic Equilibria. It’s Never A Static Problem.

Not when the cells in our body are alive and have various activities of their own!

We tend to think of our health as something static most of the time. Do X, Y and Z, clear the hurdles, and our bodies should remain healthy.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

We do have to bear in mind the Goldilocks Principle. Much like how Goldilocks found Papa Bear’s porridge too hot and Mama Bear’s porridge too cold, while Baby Bear’s porridge was “just right”, the author Christopher Booker states that

The idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling.

Unfortunately, the balance in our life also involves finding an exact middle path. That path is not static at all, and it is heavily affected by various disturbances:

In the realm of physics, an object in static equilibrium is an object that:

is at rest and is in a state of equilibrium, then we would say that the object is at “static equilibrium.” “Static” means stationary or at rest.

Whereas the activities of a live biological cell falls more under dynamic equilibrium:

Dynamic Equilibrium can be defined as the state of a given system in which the reversible reaction taking place in it stops changing the ratio of reactants and products, but there is a movement of substances between the reactants and the products.

In fact, there will be a state of dynamic equilibrium whenever there is any form of continuous movement.

Even our bank accounts! We have money moving in (income) and out (expenses) of our accounts. People who live from paycheque to paycheque are in a situation of dynamic equilibrium where whatever goes into their account is equal to whatever exits their account. There is a constant inflow and a constant outflow of money — but they do not have any chance to accumulate any of it as savings.

To maintain a state of dynamic equilibrium requires much more control measures than a state of static equilibrium.

People who have raised young children know this too — when a toddler is having a nap, they are in a state of static equilibrium, and we do not have to worry too much about monitoring them.

While when they’re awake, and running about and crashing into various objects around the house, we do have to expend more energy doing damage control.

In the same way, our body is also in multiple states of dynamic equilibria — we have so many different biological organs, tissues and cells in our body. These cells live, work, die and must be replaced. All their populations are in states of dynamic equilibria.

If we were to disrupt the dynamic population of a certain cell type and allow it to multiply and proliferate uncontrollably, we’d be staring at the development of a cancer:

Of course, if we were to disrupt the dynamic population of another cell type and kill it off uncontrollably, we’d be staring at the development of an autoimmune disorder, such as when the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas are killed off in a Type 1 diabetic:

If we were to disrupt the dynamic equilibrium between high density lipoproteins (HDL) and low density lipoproteins (LDL), we’d be staring at the development of “high blood cholesterol” — which of course, leads on into oxidative stress, inflammation and a dysregulated immune system that can proceed further into an undesirable heart attack or stroke:

The thing is that we sometimes don’t feel it until it’s too late.

And sometimes, the disruption in one state of dynamic equilibrium can have multiple cascading effects on other states of dynamic equilibrium.

Such as when one has heart disease, there will be pro-inflammatory responses being sent out to the macrophages, which produce more collagen-digesting enzymes. An atherosclerotic plaque is sealed off by a collagen layer.

And collagen is also used for providing support and structure to our joints.

So can a heart disease patient suffer from joint pain leading into osteoarthritis? Very likely indeed:

Unfortunately, understanding the fundamentals of these mechanisms are tough, and a clear understanding is further murkied by the amount of medical jargon being thrown about by the healthcare industry.

It’s easy to say that they’re all interlinked, but how?

Only when we do know how can we look at targeting the foundations of the issue, otherwise a prescribed drug is only going to deal with the surface symptoms of the issue.

It’s easy to say “I want to keep myself healthy”, but it’s more difficult to figure out how to!

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on crafting strategies to support optimal biochemical functions in the human body at https://thethinkingscientist.substack.com.