Five-Minute Stress Relief.com

Your Appendix Actually Does Something!

When you were in high school, how many times in biology class did you hear the teacher say that your appendix had no actual function, it was just an organ left over from our primitive origins? Did you wonder to yourself, how could the body be so out of touch as to manufacture an organ that doesn’t do anything?

Well, now scientists are correcting themselves. It seems Mother Nature didn’t make a mistake after all. Once again, it was just we foolish humans. (It’s kind of frightening how we make weird assumptions that we know something the DNA doesn’t!)

Now surgeons and immunologists from Duke University Medical School think they’ve come up with the answer, which was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Your appendix manufactures and protects the good bacteria (intestinal flora) in your intestinal tract.

You see, humans actually have more good bacteria in their body than they do human cells. (Remember the human body is composed of over 6 trillion cells, so that’s an amazing amount of bacteria!) So when diseases come along that wipe out armies of good bacteria, it’s the job of the appendix to restock the intestinal gut with plenty of good guys for protection.

In fact, the doctors are now terming the appendix as a ‘safe house’ (it’s about two to four inches long) for the good bacteria. And that’s why the appendix’s location is just out of the way in the large intestines so as to allow food to safely travel through, as your body extracts its nutrients.

Nowadays, with some people around you, it’s so easy to pick up bacteria from the other folks (it seems we’re all just dripping with bacteria). However in ancient times, if a disease wiped out the local population, the survivors were hard pressed to restock friendly bacteria quickly. And the longer that took, the longer they were in danger of encountering common infectious germs that suddenly could be life threatening. So in underdeveloped countries today, one’s appendix is still quite necessary.

Of course, if the appendix becomes inflamed, people should have them removed because the release of all that bacterium could be deadly. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 321,000 Americans were hospitalized with appendicitis, and every year about 300-400 Americans die from this occurrence.

© 2009 Five-Minute Stress Relief - All Rights Reserved

Print PDF Page for: Your Appendix Actually Does Something!