Caching With Gallbladder
The writeup talks about the miraculous concept of caching which has been already implemented in our body using gallbladder. Coming from a computer science background its amazing to see how our creator has made a high performant software known as body.
Disclaimer: This post is on the philosophical side of life so feel free to skip it. No material knowledge guaranteed!
Background
A week ago I started feeling pain in my upper right side of abdomen whenever I ate something. It was so bad that I had to get admitted in the emergency and was treated for hyperacidity and gastritis. The sensation came back again after two days with a less severity now. Went for an ultrasound and was shocked to find 10.2 mm stone stuck in the neck region of gallbladder + grade 2 fatty liver. These stones are called as Gallstones.
Initially I took it lightly because I have heard that there are homeopathic medicines that can dissolve the stone and beer is also a good alternative to remove stones. However I was wrong and to my disappointment the above remedies were primarily applicable for dissolving the kidney stones. The only Gold standard solution available and suggested was to remove my organ i.e Gallbladder (GB). The doctors assured me that the procedure and repercussion on my lifetime will be trivial.
Caching in Computer Science
I did some research and found that gallbladder is a storage organ for bile acid or juice. The bile is produced by liver and is critical for digestion and absorption of fats and fat-soluble vitamins in small intestine. In absence of GB, the liver directly provides the bile acid for this fat digestion process.
One of the important fundamentals in computer science is Caching. It means keeping certain data upfront in memory and avoid heavy processing again and again to complete a task. Imagine this to be the Youtube mobile app’s download button that you see below some videos. If you download any video you wont have to wait for the content to stream every-time you want to view this video.
Now imagine having a 2G or slow 3G network and you are trying to play a video. The experience will be slow and frustrating. If you would have let it download the video upfront and then viewed that, the experience will be perfect.
Caching in Human Anatomy
What you read above is what Gallbladder does to your digestion process. Instead of waiting for the liver to generate bile juice in realtime, it quickly serves the already made bile juice to aid in quick digestion of fat. The faster the digestion the better the health. A body without gallbladder performs like watching a video over 2G internet. Its bad! And the sorry state of affairs is that our medical science has yet to find a way to remove gallstones without removing this precious caching organ.
The first computer cache was made almost 80 years back and the GallBladder cache in human anatomy dates back to 300,000 years back. Call it God or Nature, we have a lot to learn and a long way to go.
Note: I still have pain and trying to find alternative medicine to debug and fix my cache.
