What Is a Lymph Node?

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let’s talk about lymph nodes and what they are a lot of people don’t really know exactly what a lymph node is in relationship to your immune system now the lymphatic system is really an extension from your circulatory system and so all this blood rushes through the body and it goes into the tissues and then from the tissues it turns into lymph and goes through the lymphatic system now the lymphatic system does not have a pump so it’s pumped through the body through muscular movement so when all this lymph flows up to the body it gets dumped back into the circulatory system it’s kind of a back up drainage system to prevent excess fluid retention as in lymphedema however that’s a minor function the big function and the most important function is the activation of your immune system you will have an entire war going on within your lymph nodes if there is a pathogenic microbes and the pathogen is a microbe that can cause disease one of the purposes of a lymph node is to contain and hold off a pathogen can protect the pathogen from spreading throughout the body so that’s why you have lymph nodes in your armpits to prevent pathogens from invading your whole arm or even in the back of your throat as the tonsils you have lymph nodes in the side of your neck you have them throughout the abdomen area into the groin there’s hundreds of lymph nodes to the body and the largest lymph node is the spleen which is located underneath the ribcage on the left side over here let’s just take a look at what is inside a lymph node well you have lymph o sites okay those are immune cells that do their work inside the lymphatic system but they can also come outside the lymphatic system and travel around to the tissues there’s three primary lymphocytes one would be the natural killer cells these cells are like part of your special forces they specialized in killing viral infected cells okay so when the virus invades the cells they will kill the entire cell and the virus together also they will attack tumor cells and cancer and this is why sometimes when you have cancer you get swelling of your glands I think people don’t realize that the immune system is not just about fighting infection it’s also about preventing cancer from invading the body and this is why when people could cancer and they get chemotherapy destroys the immune system and then they end up with secondary infections and even the cancer can come back so we need our immune system desperately to defend against many different things and then we get the T cells T cells have very specialized functions to kill very specific microbes and they are activated by another immune system called the innate the innate immune system basically is a system that you’re born with these guys don’t need any training they know what to do they’re like the first line of the defense but if they need help they’ll hold down the fort and recruit these guys right here and just one of the functions that they will do is they will direct the appropriate attacked recruiting more help to defend against pathogens because we don’t want too much immune system which will destroy the body yeah we don’t want to have too little immune system either because then the infection goes on forever so it’s a judgement call another function is determining self from non-self so there’s certain tolerance of your own body tissue that the immune system must tolerate and not attack and that also includes the friendly microbes of your body so that job is very very important because you don’t want to end up having your own immune system attack itself as an autoimmune diseases and then we have the B cells which stand for bone marrow and the T cells are thymus and that’s a little gland on top of the heart which is a place where these cells get training and not every t-cell graduates only 30% of those t-cells survive this intense training but the B cells make antibodies antibodies don’t necessarily kill any microbe these antibodies are like the identification of who needs to be assassinated with a big yellow X on their back also these antibodies are very specific to certain pathogens in fact you have an almost unlimited number of antibodies and I’m talking trillions but what happens in this lymph node is you have a lot of antibody reactions going on you also have the immune system taking tiny parts of pathogens and presenting them to the t-cell this is just one of the ways that your immune system can help locate the good guys from the bad guys you have a lot of lymph blood exchange through this lymph node so you have these lymphocytes going in and out of this tissue all the time and also one of the things that the lymph node will do it’ll filter certain cancer cells and lastly I just want to mention this point when someone has their spleen out they have an increased risk of infection and if your lymph nodes actually shrink or become dysfunctional your risk for infection and fighting off these pathogens go way up chronic stress activates cortisol which then shrinks the lymph nodes and the entire lymphatic system but also if you’re deficient in zinc you can have certain dysfunctions with the spleen as well as your lymphatic system in general now if you haven’t seen my video on how to boost the immune system I put it up right here check it out