People overestimate the state of medicine with respect to autoimmunity, which is funny in a way because they are largely completely in the dark as to how fast medical research is moving in all fields, and think that many types of near future treatment are a lot further away than is in fact the case.
The workings of the immune system are rather like the workings of metabolism: the present vast knowledge, the stuff that takes years to learn and which encompasses many disciplines as no one person can know enough of all of it to make a career of that, is actually basically just a sketch of how things work. It is a map at the high level. When it comes to the all-important details there are decades of work left at even at the present pace and with the damn impressive biotechnology the research community has now in order to get to even a moderately complete picture.
So there's a reason why many forms of autoimmunity are really hard to diagnose, and why you'll find that a great many diagnoses of exclusion are mild autoimmune conditions: here's what's wrong with you, it's the bucket we put people in when you have some symptoms and all the tests we have come back negative or with ambiguous results. Those tend to be the ones where nothing can be done at present. The author of the article should at least be happy that she is one step up from that situation.
The immune system has so many ways of running awry due to malprogramming that there really should be more work done on more gentle ways to reboot it - strip out all immune cells and start over with the patient's stem cells to repopulate it. Aggressive reboot methods involving chemotherapy have been pretty effective when trialed, but that's not something you'd want to do unless there was no alternative.
The advent of biologics for immune suppression have turned the research community away from the possibilities of the wipe clean and start over approach, however, which I think might be a mistake in the long run.
I agree, research into autoimmunity and chronic inflammation generally in western medicine seems very weak. Its better in traditional chinese and ayurvedic. Elimination diets are one form of "wipe clean and start over approach" that works for some people
The workings of the immune system are rather like the workings of metabolism: the present vast knowledge, the stuff that takes years to learn and which encompasses many disciplines as no one person can know enough of all of it to make a career of that, is actually basically just a sketch of how things work. It is a map at the high level. When it comes to the all-important details there are decades of work left at even at the present pace and with the damn impressive biotechnology the research community has now in order to get to even a moderately complete picture.
So there's a reason why many forms of autoimmunity are really hard to diagnose, and why you'll find that a great many diagnoses of exclusion are mild autoimmune conditions: here's what's wrong with you, it's the bucket we put people in when you have some symptoms and all the tests we have come back negative or with ambiguous results. Those tend to be the ones where nothing can be done at present. The author of the article should at least be happy that she is one step up from that situation.
The immune system has so many ways of running awry due to malprogramming that there really should be more work done on more gentle ways to reboot it - strip out all immune cells and start over with the patient's stem cells to repopulate it. Aggressive reboot methods involving chemotherapy have been pretty effective when trialed, but that's not something you'd want to do unless there was no alternative.
The advent of biologics for immune suppression have turned the research community away from the possibilities of the wipe clean and start over approach, however, which I think might be a mistake in the long run.