Lyon wrote:
... I personally am trying to distance myself from the term and mindset of "autoimmune" and instead focus on the "inflammatory" aspect in the relationship of these diseases which have "suddenly" appeared in history in the "industrialized/developed" populations and remain rare/unheard of among the "undeveloped".
I don't know if you have an interest but it would be interesting for someone in your situation to go through "rebooting" which might be expected to eliminate any and all disease processes related to our becoming "developed".........if a person happened to lean towards those beliefs
It's an interesting theory, Bill, but with the exception of polio which DOES seem to have some bearing on societies becoming too "clean," there isn't a condition/disease that I know of that wasn't noted--if not accurately described, of course--in the vast record of medical history.
Only ten years ago, osteoporosis was deemed a condition exclusively limited to blue-eyed white women of northern European ancestry. Now we know it's a worldwide plague and nabs a lot of men in its insidious little net, too.
MS and its buds in the Gang of Four neural cluster (MS, lupus, myasthenia and Parkinson's) seem to be "the usual suspects" when it comes to assigning post-Industrializatrion blame. It's one thing for medical literature to write up the phenomenon being limited to the industrialized west... but I have to play Devil's Advocate and remind people that up until the last 20 years ago, India had only THREE CT scanners in the whole country. There are quite a few more now, of course, but MRI machines are even rarer--and with them, conclusive diagnoses.
Which begs the question: how many certain MS patients slipped under the radar and were either misdiagnosed with "something else" or ignored altogether. The very first (fired) neuro I met told me that prior to the MRI days, he would have considered me a "benign case" and that would have been the end of it.
There are consequences for living in the modern era, that's for sure. I think of the vast pool of those first X-ray techs working without any sort of protection at all and it's cringe-worthy. No telling how many of them were cancer casualties later in their lives.
But for them--and the miracle that X-ray technology gave us--we'd still be flying blind. Quite literally, in the medical sense of the word.
There's very little that's new under the sun. What is new is the ability to recognize it and with luck, do something about it.
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