This Is Your Endocrine System

Gather round as I tell you about something so important that it controls almost everything that goes on inside your body, but so secret that almost nobody knows about it. Oh, a few may know the name of it, but they couldn’t explain it to you–even if you offered them a million dollars.

What is this important, mysterious thing? Your endocrine system.

The endocrine system tells your body how to work–or not. If your brain gets fogged over, think endocrine. If your hair gets thin and falls out, think endocrine. If your weight keeps ballooning no matter what you do, think endocrine. If you get an autoimmune disease, think endocrine. Heck, whatever happens, at least give a thought to the endocrine system.

You want amazing? Check out the endocrine system. Not only does the list of activities go on and on, the level of cooperation between endocrine glands goes to the death. If one gland starts to falter, the others try to help. If one gland dies, the others throw themselves on the funeral pyre in an attempt to make things better.

Don’t ever decide you can have a problem with only one endocrine gland. One gland may outdo the others in creating a mess, but they’re all in there, bailing like crazy.

Plus, all the endocrine glands work in all parts of the body. Receptors for thyroid hormone, for instance, are in the gut, and estrogen receptors are in the brain. Well, who knew?

Endocrine problems are systemwide, and everything affects everything. To use an expression from my old IBM days, a flow chart of what goes on would look like an explosion in a spaghetti factory.

That said, for comprehension’s sake, I’m going to write about the system one piece and one article at time. Just keep a thought in the back of your mind that nothing in the endocrine system acts independently and don’t skip a gland or two because you don’t think they apply.

I’ll write about are hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenals, parathyroids, pancreas, pineal, thymus, gonads and leptin, which is not actually a gland, but a real player in the endocrine game. The title to each article will start “This Is Your Endocrine System” so they’ll be easy to find.

As I discuss each of the endocrine glands, keep in mind all of them converse back and forth 24/7 in a looped feedback kind of system. If one shows sign of trouble, the others jump in to do what they can to help out. Endocrine problems are system-wide, not local.

One final thought: Whenever you hear the word ‘hormone,’ you know the topic is the endocrine system–the source of our hormones. And hormones are the gas that keeps the engine running.