Why Are Autoimmune Diseases on the Rise?
Changing environments, extraordinary stress, and the autoimmunity epidemic
Stacy Verdick Case was ill with a host of disparate symptoms. She suffered from joint pain, heart palpitations, and severe fatigue. Doctors tried to address her symptoms, prescribing her the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, attending to her acid reflux, or telling her to exercise. But no one could figure out the root of her underlying health problems.
“Every time they’d look for the cause, there was no cause,” Case says. “Being treated has been a nightmare.”
It took nearly three years and dozens of doctors before Case got a diagnosis: Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation of the thyroid and a number of associated problems, like fatigue and weight fluctuation.
While Case’s disease is rare, autoimmune diseases are not — and neither is the difficulty of her journey to reach a diagnosis. It can take a person an average of five years and five doctors to get diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, according to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) — despite the fact that some 50 million Americans suffer from one. Autoimmunity is now one of the most common disease categories, ahead of cancer and heart disease. And while rates of the latter…
