What Is Inflammation? Friend, Foe and the Chronic Middle

Pull a splinter out of your thumb and watch what happens over the next hour. The skin flushes pink, warms slightly, puffs up around the puncture, and stings when you press it. Nobody taught your thumb to do this. It’s a repair sequence older than medicine itself, Roman physicians described it almost 2,000 years ago, and it’s happening in your body, somewhere, right now.

That same process has become one of the most talked-about words in wellness, blamed for everything from tired mornings to heart attacks, and “fought” by an endless parade of teas, powders, and elimination diets. Some of that talk is grounded in serious science. A lot of it is not.

The honest story sits in the middle: inflammation is neither villain nor cure-all. It’s a tool your body uses brilliantly for days and badly for decades. Knowing the difference is what actually matters for your heart, your metabolism, and your long-term health.

What Is Inflammation, Exactly?

Inflammation isn’t a substance you accumulate or a toxin you flush. It’s a coordinated process: the immune system’s emergency response to anything it reads as a threat: bacteria, a virus, a torn muscle fiber, a chemical irritant, even a splinter.

The sequence runs like a well-drilled fire brigade. Damaged cells release chemical distress signals. Nearby blood vessels widen and become slightly leaky, which speeds delivery of white blood cells and plasma proteins to the scene. First on site are neutrophils, short-lived cells that swallow bacteria and debris. Macrophages follow to clean up, and signaling proteins called cytokines coordinate the whole operation, some ramping the response up, others winding it down.

That last part deserves more attention than it gets. Healthy inflammation doesn’t just start well; it resolves well. Specialized signals actively switch the response off once the threat is cleared, tissue repair begins, and the site returns to normal. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this acute process typically plays out over hours to a few days.

When people talk about inflammation as a health problem, they usually mean something different: a response that never fully shuts off. The fire brigade stays parked in the neighborhood, hoses trickling, month after month. The machinery is identical, same cells, same cytokines, but the timing is broken. That distinction, between a response and a state, is the key to almost every question that follows.

What Are the 5 Main Signs of Inflammation?

The classic five were catalogued in antiquity, four by the Roman encyclopedist Celsus, the fifth attributed to the physician Galen, and clinicians still use them at the bedside today:

• Redness (rubor): widened blood vessels bring more blood to the area, tinting the skin pink or red.
• Heat (calor): that extra blood flow carries core body warmth to the surface, so an inflamed ankle feels warmer than the one beside it.
• Swelling (tumor): leaky vessels let fluid and proteins seep into surrounding tissue, creating puffiness.
• Pain (dolor): inflammatory chemicals sensitize nerve endings, and the pressure of swelling adds its own ache.
• Loss of function (functio laesa): a swollen, painful joint simply won’t move the way it should, partly protective, forcing rest while repair proceeds.

Each sign has a mechanical explanation, which is worth remembering the next time a product promises to “detox” inflammation away. There’s nothing mystical happening; it’s plumbing and chemistry.

Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: these five signs describe acute inflammation. The chronic, low-grade version linked to heart disease and diabetes often produces none of them. No redness, no obvious swelling, at most, vague fatigue or aches that are easy to attribute to a busy life. That invisibility is precisely why chronic inflammation earned its reputation as a silent contributor to disease, and why the classic checklist, useful as it is, can’t rule the problem out.

Acute vs. Chronic Inflammation: What's the Difference?

Duration changes everything. The same biological response that saves you from an infected cut can, when it persists, slowly damage the tissues it was meant to protect. Harvard Health describes chronic inflammation as a response that lingers, leaving the body in a constant state of alert, and over time, that alert state takes a toll.

	Acute inflammation	Chronic inflammation
Onset	Minutes to hours	Gradual, often unnoticed
Duration	Days, occasionally weeks	Months to years
Typical triggers	Injury, infection, burns	Excess visceral fat, smoking, persistent infections, autoimmune activity, ongoing stress
How it feels	Red, hot, swollen, painful	Often silent; sometimes fatigue, low-grade aches
Outcome	Resolution and repair	Gradual tissue damage; raised risk of long-term disease

The examples make it concrete. A sprained ankle is acute inflammation working as designed: dramatic for a week, then gone. Rheumatoid arthritis is chronic inflammation misfiring: the immune system attacking joint linings for years. And the plaque quietly building in a coronary artery is chronic inflammation at its most consequential, progressing for decades without a single classic sign.

A 2019 review in Nature Medicine put the stakes plainly: its authors estimated that chronic inflammatory diseases contribute to more than half of deaths worldwide, spanning heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and kidney disease. That figure is an estimate, not a precise count, but it explains why researchers take the “chronic middle” so seriously.

Is Inflammation Good or Bad?

Both, and the wellness industry’s habit of treating it as purely bad has done real harm to public understanding.

Without inflammation, you wouldn’t survive childhood. Every scraped knee would be an open door for bacteria; every respiratory virus could run unopposed. People born with certain immune deficiencies that blunt the inflammatory response face life-threatening infections from organisms most of us shrug off. Inflammation is also how wounds heal: the cleanup crews that arrive in those first hours clear debris so rebuilding can start. Blocking that process entirely would slow healing, not speed it.

So the useful question isn’t “how do I eliminate inflammation?” It’s “is my inflammation doing its job and then standing down?” Three things separate helpful from harmful:

• Duration. Days of inflammation heal a wound. Years of it erode tissue.
• Target. Aimed at bacteria, inflammation protects. Aimed at your own joints, thyroid, or gut lining, as in autoimmune conditions, it destroys.
• Intensity and location. Low-grade inflammation inside artery walls is more dangerous over 30 years than a vigorous, visible response to a bee sting is over three days.

This is why the evidence-based goal is not an “anti-inflammatory lifestyle” in the sense of suppressing the response, but reducing the unnecessary triggers that keep it switched on. Your immune system doesn’t need silencing. It needs fewer false alarms, and that reframing, in my view, is the single most useful correction to how this topic gets discussed.

What Causes Chronic Inflammation?

Chronic inflammation rarely has one cause. It’s usually an accumulation of steady, low-level provocations, each one modest, together enough to keep the immune system idling in alarm mode.

The best-documented drivers include:

• Excess visceral fat. Fat stored deep in the abdomen isn’t inert padding; it actively secretes inflammatory cytokines. This is arguably the most common driver in the United States, and it links inflammation directly to metabolic health.
• Smoking. Tobacco smoke irritates airway and blood-vessel linings continuously, provoking an immune response with every exposure.
• Persistent infections. Untreated gum disease is a textbook example: a low-grade bacterial infection that keeps immune activity simmering for years. Certain chronic viral infections do the same.
• Autoimmune conditions. In diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and inflammatory bowel disease, the immune system mistakes the body’s own tissue for a threat.
• Diet pattern. Eating habits heavy in sugar-sweetened drinks, refined carbohydrates, and heavily processed foods are associated with higher inflammatory markers in observational research.
• Physical inactivity, short sleep, and chronic stress. Each independently nudges inflammatory markers upward; combined, they compound.
• Environmental exposures. Long-term air pollution exposure is linked to elevated inflammation, particularly in the lungs and cardiovascular system.

Notice what’s on this list and what isn’t. Nightshade vegetables, gluten (for people without celiac disease or diagnosed sensitivity), and “acidic foods” don’t appear in the mainstream evidence as meaningful drivers. Belly fat, cigarettes, and untreated gum disease do. Where you aim your effort should follow the evidence, not the marketing.

How Does Inflammation Affect the Heart?

For decades, atherosclerosis, the buildup of plaque in artery walls, was pictured as a plumbing problem: fat sludging up a pipe. The modern understanding, endorsed by the American Heart Association, is different and more interesting. Plaque is an inflammatory lesion.

The sequence goes roughly like this. LDL cholesterol particles slip into the inner lining of an artery wall, where they become chemically modified. The immune system reads those modified particles as a threat and dispatches white blood cells to engulf them. Stuffed with fat, these cells transform into “foam cells” and accumulate, along with debris and scar-like tissue, into plaque. Inflammation doesn’t just start this process: it also determines how it ends. Inflamed plaques develop thin, fragile caps, and when a cap ruptures, a clot forms. That clot is what causes most heart attacks.

The evidence goes beyond mechanism. People with elevated inflammatory markers face higher cardiovascular risk even when their cholesterol numbers look reasonable. And in 2017, a large international trial showed that a medicine targeting a specific inflammatory pathway, with no effect on cholesterol at all, reduced repeat cardiovascular events in people who’d already had a heart attack. That was the proof-of-concept moment: inflammation isn’t a bystander in heart disease; it’s a participant.

The practical upshot is encouraging rather than frightening. Many of the same habits that improve cholesterol and blood pressure, not smoking, staying active, eating well, also lower the inflammatory side of cardiovascular risk. You’re not fighting on two fronts. It’s largely the same front.

Inflammation and Metabolism: The Belly-Fat Connection

Here’s a fact that reshaped metabolic medicine: fat tissue is not storage foam. It’s an active endocrine organ, and the fat packed around abdominal organs, visceral fat, is its most chemically talkative form.

Visceral fat cells, especially when enlarged, release inflammatory cytokines into the bloodstream. Immune cells also infiltrate expanding fat tissue, adding their own signals. The result is a steady drip of inflammatory chemistry that reaches the liver, muscles, and blood vessels around the clock.

One consequence matters most for metabolism: those inflammatory signals interfere with insulin’s ability to do its job. Insulin normally tells muscle and liver cells to pull glucose out of the blood. Inflammatory cytokines disrupt that signaling at the cellular level, contributing to insulin resistance: the condition in which the pancreas must produce ever more insulin to keep blood sugar in range. Insulin resistance is the runway to type 2 diabetes, and it travels with fatty liver, unfavorable cholesterol patterns, and higher blood pressure.

This creates an uncomfortable loop. Excess visceral fat drives inflammation; inflammation worsens insulin resistance; insulin resistance encourages further fat storage. But loops run in both directions, and that’s the genuinely hopeful part. Research consistently finds that even modest reductions in visceral fat: the kind achieved through sustained changes in eating and activity, not dramatic transformations, are accompanied by measurable drops in inflammatory markers. Waist circumference, for all its low-tech simplicity, tracks this deep fat reasonably well, which is why clinicians still reach for the tape measure.

If chronic inflammation has a single most modifiable source for most adults, this is it.

Which Foods Cause Inflammation?

Let’s be honest about what the evidence shows, because this is where the conversation usually goes off the rails. No single food “causes inflammation” in the way a splinter does. What research links to higher inflammatory markers are patterns of eating, sustained over years.

The patterns with the strongest evidence against them, per Harvard Health and others:

• Sugar-sweetened beverages and refined carbohydrates. Regular intake of soda, white bread, and pastries is associated with elevated inflammatory markers, likely through blood sugar spikes and their contribution to visceral fat.
• Processed and red meats. Frequent consumption of hot dogs, sausage, and similar products correlates with higher inflammation in observational studies.
• Fried foods. Particularly those cooked repeatedly in the same oils.
• Industrial trans fats. The clearest villain of the group, so clearly inflammatory and harmful to heart health that regulators moved to remove artificial trans fats from the US food supply.

Now the myth-busting. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and other nightshades are routinely accused of being inflammatory; controlled evidence doesn’t support this for the general population, and these vegetables carry nutrients associated with lower inflammation. Gluten is genuinely inflammatory for people with celiac disease and problematic for those with diagnosed sensitivity, and shows no such effect in everyone else. Coffee, another frequent suspect, is associated with lower inflammatory markers in most studies, not higher.

The uncomfortable truth for anyone selling an elimination diet: the inflammatory potential of your diet is mostly about what dominates your plate week after week, not about one forbidden ingredient.

What Foods Actually Fight Inflammation?

The good news is that the evidence-backed answer looks like food people actually enjoy, not a punishment protocol.

Harvard Health’s list of foods associated with lower inflammation reads like a Mediterranean market stall: olive oil, fatty fish such as salmon and sardines, leafy greens, tomatoes, berries, oranges, and nuts including almonds and walnuts. Whole grains and legumes belong in the picture too. The common threads are fiber, unsaturated fats, omega-3 fatty acids, and polyphenols, plant compounds that appear to temper inflammatory signaling.

The strongest evidence sits with the whole pattern rather than any single item. The Mediterranean-style diet has been tested in randomized trials, most famously a large Spanish study that found fewer major cardiovascular events among people assigned to a Mediterranean diet enriched with olive oil or nuts. Participants in such studies also tend to show lower levels of inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.

Two honest caveats. First, effect sizes are moderate. Swapping butter for olive oil will not “cure” anything, and any headline suggesting otherwise is overselling. Diet shifts inflammatory markers gradually, over weeks to months, as part of an overall risk picture. Second, no superfood carries the pattern alone. Blueberries are excellent; blueberries sprinkled over a diet of fried food and soda are a garnish, not a strategy.

A practical framing that respects the evidence: build most meals around plants, use olive oil as your default fat, eat fish a couple of times a week, and let heavily processed items become occasional rather than daily. That’s the whole trick. It’s unglamorous, which may be why it’s undersold.

Does Exercise Reduce Inflammation?

Yes, with a wrinkle that confuses people, so let’s untangle it.

A single hard workout temporarily raises inflammatory markers. Muscle fibers sustain microscopic stress, and the body mounts a brief, local inflammatory response to repair and reinforce them. That’s not damage in any worrying sense; it’s the mechanism of getting stronger. The soreness two days after a new workout is acute inflammation doing constructive work.

Regular training tells a different story. People who exercise consistently show lower baseline levels of inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, than sedentary people: a finding replicated across large observational studies and supported by intervention trials. Several mechanisms contribute. Working muscle releases signaling molecules called myokines, some of which have direct anti-inflammatory effects. Regular activity shrinks visceral fat, removing a major cytokine source. And exercise appears to shift immune cells toward less inflammatory behavior over time.

How much is enough? The standard public-health target, at least 150 minutes of moderate activity per week, the level endorsed by the American Heart Association and CDC, is associated with meaningful reductions in inflammatory markers. That’s a 30-minute brisk walk, five days a week. Adding two sessions of strength training helps preserve muscle, which matters because muscle tissue is itself metabolically protective.

One more encouraging detail: the anti-inflammatory benefit doesn’t require athleticism. Studies find the steepest improvement when people move from sedentary to moderately active. The gap between the couch and the daily walk is, biologically speaking, far wider than the gap between the daily walk and the marathon.

Sleep, Stress, and the Inflammatory Thermostat

If diet and exercise are the headliners, sleep and stress are the stagehands, less visible, quietly essential.

Sleep first. Experimental studies in which healthy volunteers are restricted to four or five hours of sleep show measurable rises in inflammatory markers, including interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, sometimes within days. Chronic short sleep in the real world is associated with the same elevated markers, along with higher rates of the conditions inflammation helps drive: hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. The mainstream recommendation of seven to nine hours for adults isn’t arbitrary comfort advice; it appears to be the range in which inflammatory regulation works as designed. Untreated sleep apnea deserves special mention: the repeated oxygen dips it causes are a potent inflammatory trigger, and it often goes undiagnosed for years.

Stress works through a subtler mechanism. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, is actually anti-inflammatory in short bursts: it’s part of how the body winds responses down. The problem arises when stress is unrelenting. Under chronic cortisol exposure, immune cells appear to become less responsive to its “stand down” signal, a phenomenon researchers call glucocorticoid resistance. The brake pedal is pressed, but the car keeps rolling. The result: chronically stressed people tend to show higher, not lower, inflammatory activity.

What helps is less exotic than the wellness market suggests. Regular physical activity buffers stress physiology. Consistent sleep timing helps. Evidence for mindfulness-based practices shows modest but real reductions in inflammatory markers in some trials. None of these are dramatic interventions, which is fitting, because chronic inflammation is rarely a dramatic problem. It’s a cumulative one, and it responds to cumulative habits.

Can a Blood Test Measure Inflammation?

Yes, several can, and it’s worth understanding what they do and don’t reveal.

The workhorse is C-reactive protein (CRP), a molecule the liver produces in response to inflammatory signals. Standard CRP tests help clinicians track infections and flares of inflammatory diseases. A more sensitive version, high-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP), detects the low-grade elevations relevant to cardiovascular risk. According to Mayo Clinic, an hs-CRP of 2 milligrams per liter or higher suggests elevated heart disease risk, while values below that suggest lower risk. Other common markers include erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), an older test that measures how quickly red blood cells settle in a tube, faster settling signals more inflammatory proteins in the blood.

Now the limitations, which matter as much as the numbers:

• These tests are non-specific. CRP rises with a cold, a dental infection, a recent hard workout, or an injury. It tells you inflammation exists somewhere; it cannot say where or why. A single elevated reading, in isolation, means little.
• Timing matters. Clinicians often repeat hs-CRP testing weeks apart to distinguish a temporary blip from a genuine baseline.
• It’s one input, not a verdict. hs-CRP is most useful as part of a broader cardiovascular risk assessment, alongside blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and family history, not as a standalone health score.

A gentle warning about direct-to-consumer “inflammation panels”: without clinical context, they generate more anxiety than insight. If you’re curious about your inflammatory status, the more useful conversation is with a clinician who can interpret the number against the whole of your health picture.

How Do You Get Rid of Inflammation in Your Body?

Start with the honest answer: you don’t want to get rid of it, and you can’t. Inflammation is your immune system’s core function. What you can do, and what the evidence supports, is lower your chronic inflammatory load by removing the false alarms that keep the system activated.

The interventions with real evidence behind them will sound familiar, because they’re the same ones that protect the heart and metabolism generally:

• Reduce excess visceral fat, gradually and sustainably. This removes the body’s largest ongoing cytokine source.
• Don’t smoke. Inflammatory markers begin falling within weeks to months of quitting.
• Eat a Mediterranean-style pattern and let sugary drinks and heavily processed foods become occasional.
• Move most daysat least 150 minutes of moderate activity weekly.
• Sleep seven to nine hours, and get evaluated if you snore heavily or wake unrefreshed.
• See a dentist. Treating gum disease shuts down a genuine, ongoing inflammatory source that most people never connect to their overall health.
• Treat underlying conditions. Autoimmune disease, chronic infections, and metabolic conditions need medical management, not lifestyle tweaks alone.

Set realistic expectations on timing: inflammatory markers respond to lifestyle change over weeks to months, not days. Anything promising to “flush inflammation” in 72 hours is describing something biology doesn’t do.

On supplements: evidence for popular options like turmeric extracts and fish oil is genuinely mixed, some trials show modest reductions in markers, others show nothing, and quality varies widely between products. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements is a sober source on what’s actually known. Supplements are, at best, a small addendum to the list above, never a substitute for it.

When to See a Doctor About Inflammation

Most inflammation needs no medical attention: a bruise, a sore throat, post-workout aches all resolve on their own. But some patterns deserve a professional look, and a few demand one urgently.

Make an appointment if you notice:

• Joint swelling, stiffness, or pain lasting more than a few weeks, especially if it affects both sides of the body or is worst in the morning. Early evaluation matters in inflammatory arthritis, because joint damage can be limited when treatment starts promptly.
• Persistent unexplained symptoms: fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest, low-grade fevers, night sweats, unintended weight loss, or recurring rashes. Individually these are common and usually benign; in combination and persisting, they warrant a workup.
• Digestive symptoms that won’t resolveongoing abdominal pain, diarrhea lasting beyond a couple of weeks, or blood in the stool.
• Any acute inflammation that behaves abnormally: a wound or insect bite where redness keeps spreading after 48 hours, red streaks extending from the site, worsening pain, pus, or fever. These suggest infection outpacing the immune response and can need prompt treatment.

Seek immediate care for signs of severe systemic response: high fever with confusion, rapid breathing, chest pain, or a rash that doesn’t fade when pressed.

One thing not to do: self-diagnose “chronic inflammation” from a symptom checklist online and launch a restrictive diet in response. Fatigue and aches have dozens of possible causes, some of which, thyroid conditions, anemia, sleep disorders, depression, need entirely different care. A clinician can test, examine, and actually answer the question. Guessing can’t.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 5 main signs of inflammation?

The five classic signs are redness, heat, swelling, pain, and loss of function. Widened blood vessels cause the redness and warmth, leaking fluid creates swelling, inflammatory chemicals sensitize nerves to cause pain, and the combination limits movement. Importantly, these signs describe acute inflammation. The chronic, low-grade inflammation linked to heart disease and diabetes usually produces no visible signs at all, which is why it can persist unnoticed for years.

Is inflammation good or bad?

It’s both, depending on duration and target. Acute inflammation is essential: it fights infection and heals wounds, and life without it would be dangerous. The harmful form is chronic, low-grade inflammation that persists for months or years, gradually damaging tissue and raising the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other conditions. The evidence-based goal isn’t suppressing inflammation but removing the ongoing triggers, like smoking and excess visceral fat, that keep it switched on.

Which foods cause inflammation?

No single food causes inflammation the way an injury does, but dietary patterns matter. Regular intake of sugar-sweetened drinks, refined carbohydrates, processed meats, fried foods, and trans fats is associated with higher inflammatory markers in research summarized by Harvard Health. Commonly blamed foods like nightshade vegetables show no such effect in mainstream evidence, and gluten is only inflammatory for people with celiac disease or diagnosed sensitivity. The overall pattern, sustained over years, is what counts.

How do you get rid of inflammation in your body?

You can’t eliminate inflammation, it’s a core immune function, but you can lower chronic inflammatory load. The evidence supports reducing excess belly fat, not smoking, eating a Mediterranean-style diet, getting at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise weekly, sleeping seven to nine hours, treating gum disease, and managing underlying medical conditions. Inflammatory markers respond over weeks to months, not days, so be skeptical of any product promising a rapid inflammation flush.

Does sugar cause inflammation?

Regularly consuming large amounts of added sugar, especially from sugar-sweetened beverages, is associated with elevated inflammatory markers in observational research. The likely mechanisms are repeated blood sugar spikes and sugar’s contribution to visceral fat, which itself secretes inflammatory chemicals. An occasional dessert is not the issue; a daily pattern of sugary drinks and refined carbohydrates is. Reducing added sugar is one of the better-supported dietary steps for lowering chronic inflammatory load.

Can stress cause inflammation?

Chronic stress is linked to higher inflammatory activity, which seems paradoxical because the stress hormone cortisol is anti-inflammatory in short bursts. Under prolonged stress, immune cells appear to become less responsive to cortisol’s shutdown signal, a phenomenon called glucocorticoid resistance, leaving inflammation less well regulated. Studies of chronically stressed people, such as long-term caregivers, consistently show elevated inflammatory markers. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and stress-management practices show modest but measurable benefits.

How long does acute inflammation last?

Acute inflammation typically resolves within a few days to about two weeks, depending on the trigger and its severity. A minor cut may calm within days, while a sprained ankle can stay swollen for a week or two as repair proceeds. If redness keeps spreading after 48 hours, pain worsens instead of easing, or you develop fever, pus, or red streaks from the site, see a clinician: those signs suggest infection rather than normal healing.

What blood test shows inflammation?

C-reactive protein (CRP) is the most common marker, and the high-sensitivity version (hs-CRP) detects the low-grade elevation relevant to heart disease risk: Mayo Clinic notes that values of 2 mg/L or higher suggest elevated cardiovascular risk. Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) is another standard test. Both are non-specific: they confirm inflammation exists somewhere but can’t say where or why, so results need interpretation alongside your full health picture, ideally by a clinician.

Do turmeric or fish oil supplements reduce inflammation?

The evidence is genuinely mixed. Some trials of turmeric extracts and omega-3 supplements show modest reductions in inflammatory markers; others show no meaningful effect, and product quality varies widely. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements offers balanced summaries of what’s known. Eating omega-3-rich fish as part of an overall Mediterranean-style pattern has stronger support than any capsule. Supplements are at most a small addition to proven habits, never a substitute, and worth discussing with your clinician first.

Can chronic inflammation be reversed?

It can often be substantially reduced, depending on the cause. When drivers like excess visceral fat, smoking, poor sleep, or gum disease are addressed, inflammatory markers measurably fall over weeks to months. Chronic inflammation from autoimmune disease requires medical management and may be controlled rather than eliminated. The realistic framing: lifestyle change lowers the chronic inflammatory load meaningfully in most people, and doing so tracks with lower long-term risk of heart and metabolic disease.

This article is for general information only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult a qualified doctor about your individual situation.