Why are there so many people with autoimmune illnesses?

by Oana

My friend has been an alternative medicine physician’s assistant for 25 years. She told me that until a few years ago it was a rarity to have patients with Hashimoto’s, and lately such patients are crossing their threshold almost daily. They have patients with one autoimmune illness, two and sometimes even three autoimmune illnesses.

I learned to recognize people with ankylosing spondylitis on the street. They have a question mark posture, stiff, sometimes with uneven shoulders. Lately I see them more and more often. At the store where I buy turkey meat, one of the vendors has ankylosing spondylitis. It seemed strange to me once when, standing in line, I saw a buyer with a well-known posture. In 2 square meters there were 3 people with ankylosing spondylitis, and it was not a gathering of the illness group. The last estimate I could find for the incidence of spondylitis in the general population was from 2013, somewhere between 0.5 and 1.8%. I’m thinking that either this estimate is long out of date, or it was a freak coincidence.

Another day, a gentleman in his 60s, visibly with ankylosing spondylitis, was talking to the saleswoman at the bread isle, telling her that he had diabetes and to recommend the best bread. I couldn’t help myself and told him that the best bread is without bread. He asked me ironically if I was a nutritionist and that his doctor recommended 150 grams of bread a day. I’m not a doctor, I’m just a nutritionist technician, but I know that 150 grams of bread is 6 serious slices. I eat 6 slices of bread in a week. And I don’t have diabetes. But, well, I’m not contradicting the doctor. So I let it go and asked him: But you also have another illness, don’t you? – Yes, spondylitis. – I have too, I said. – Lady, ankylosing spondylitis, with HLAB27! You don’t have anything like that, he said measuring me from top to bottom. – Yes, I have. – Then you had a late onset, you have a mild form… – At 18 years old. And I was stiff and in pain. – And now what are you doing?! – I don’t eat store bought bread anymore.

Okay, the reasons are more, but what could I say to the man in the store door? That if he gets angry when a sassy woman approaches him in the store telling him what to do, his blood sugar spikes (this is a truth, not a joke)? To stop paying attention to all the trifles or not to put the doctor on a pedestal and get better informed, and try other approaches to improve his health? That there are other alternatives to commercial bread, but they require a bit of effort? I minded my own business.

And yet, why are there so many people with autoimmune illnesses?

I don’t have an answer. Just a lot of questions. What are we doing wrong that this is happening? How has our existence, environment, way of eating, living, thinking, looking at life changed? And more importantly, how can we prevent these illnesses in the future, and if we do have them, how can we feel better? Let’s not look for what we lost, because starting from how we were before we got sick, but let’s aim for a new balance, each of us to do this separately, but also together. Let’s have an open mind so we can understand what is happening to us.

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