The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope (No Series) by Donna Jackson Nakazawa Page B
Authors: Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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mistakenly damage the patient’s own cells in devastating blasts of self-sabotage, resulting in thyroid diseases such as Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism. Together, Rose and Witebsky published their findings.
By 1957, the concept of autoimmune disease was born—though it would be another ten years or more before it was accepted. Yet despite Rose’s startling discovery—and despite the growing number of scientists whose quiet work would, over the next several decades, substantiate his findings—medical schools continued to churn out specialists who were taught horror autotoxicus : the body’s immune system could not develop an autoimmune response. For Rose, it was a train wreck in the making: while fellow scientists could and should have been ferreting out potential causes for autoimmune disease, no one was even on the case.
It was a classic case of what twentieth-century scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn once termed “normal science.” Science is conservative in nature, unwilling to abandon ideas without persuasive evidence. The overwhelming majority of scientists accept a single scientific ideology as the starting point from which they form their own viewpoint—the pathway from which they view the entire scientific landscape—to the degree that they cannot overturn that ideology, even if research begins to show that it is blatantly leading them astray.
It wasn’t for another decade that scientists around the country began to wake up—at first one by one, and then in droves—to what Rose and his colleagues had long known: autoimmune responses could be triggered to affect virtually every organ and system of the body. Meanwhile, as this startling autoimmune connection came to light, different groups of specialists quickly scrambled to claim whole sets of diseases as their own. Rheumatologists, discovering that the root cause of rheumatoid arthritis was the body attacking and inflaming its own tissue, claimed arthritis, lupus, and all other joint-related autoimmune illnesses as rheumatologic disorders. Neurologists, discovering that in a whole host of diseases—MS, myasthenia gravis, myositis, Guillain-Barré syndrome—the body was destroying parts of its neuromuscular system, became designated specialists in those diseases. Likewise, bowel disorders—Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and inflammatory bowel disease—were farmed out to the gastroenterologists.
By the early 1970s autoimmunity was finally an accepted precept—and yet there was no one standing on the mountaintop, looking down at these various specialists’ fiefdoms and seeing how the roads leading to them intersected or asking what the common biological origins or treatments for these diseases might be.
Certainly no one was asking what triggered these diseases. What was wreaking havoc with the intricate inner workings of the human immune system in populations throughout the industrialized world?
In fact, up until the mid 1990s, no one had bothered to figure out how many Americans had an autoimmune disease. Numbers on how many Americans have each type of cancer in each state have been collected by the National Cancer Institute since 1973; the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control have collected data on cancer since the early 1900s. Yet it was only a decade ago that scientists first began to cast about for a general sense of how many Americans might be afflicted with autoimmune disease. In 1995, Noel Rose approached Virginia Ladd, president of the then fledgling American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA), the only autoimmune advocacy organization that encompasses all of the autoimmune diseases, and said, “We have got to find the numbers.” Ladd, a small but determined gray-haired dynamo who had founded the organization, was able to come up with only five thousand dollars to fund the project, a paltry sum in the high-roller arena of scientific research. With that, Rose hired a PhD
By 1957, the concept of autoimmune disease was born—though it would be another ten years or more before it was accepted. Yet despite Rose’s startling discovery—and despite the growing number of scientists whose quiet work would, over the next several decades, substantiate his findings—medical schools continued to churn out specialists who were taught horror autotoxicus : the body’s immune system could not develop an autoimmune response. For Rose, it was a train wreck in the making: while fellow scientists could and should have been ferreting out potential causes for autoimmune disease, no one was even on the case.
It was a classic case of what twentieth-century scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn once termed “normal science.” Science is conservative in nature, unwilling to abandon ideas without persuasive evidence. The overwhelming majority of scientists accept a single scientific ideology as the starting point from which they form their own viewpoint—the pathway from which they view the entire scientific landscape—to the degree that they cannot overturn that ideology, even if research begins to show that it is blatantly leading them astray.
It wasn’t for another decade that scientists around the country began to wake up—at first one by one, and then in droves—to what Rose and his colleagues had long known: autoimmune responses could be triggered to affect virtually every organ and system of the body. Meanwhile, as this startling autoimmune connection came to light, different groups of specialists quickly scrambled to claim whole sets of diseases as their own. Rheumatologists, discovering that the root cause of rheumatoid arthritis was the body attacking and inflaming its own tissue, claimed arthritis, lupus, and all other joint-related autoimmune illnesses as rheumatologic disorders. Neurologists, discovering that in a whole host of diseases—MS, myasthenia gravis, myositis, Guillain-Barré syndrome—the body was destroying parts of its neuromuscular system, became designated specialists in those diseases. Likewise, bowel disorders—Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and inflammatory bowel disease—were farmed out to the gastroenterologists.
By the early 1970s autoimmunity was finally an accepted precept—and yet there was no one standing on the mountaintop, looking down at these various specialists’ fiefdoms and seeing how the roads leading to them intersected or asking what the common biological origins or treatments for these diseases might be.
Certainly no one was asking what triggered these diseases. What was wreaking havoc with the intricate inner workings of the human immune system in populations throughout the industrialized world?
In fact, up until the mid 1990s, no one had bothered to figure out how many Americans had an autoimmune disease. Numbers on how many Americans have each type of cancer in each state have been collected by the National Cancer Institute since 1973; the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control have collected data on cancer since the early 1900s. Yet it was only a decade ago that scientists first began to cast about for a general sense of how many Americans might be afflicted with autoimmune disease. In 1995, Noel Rose approached Virginia Ladd, president of the then fledgling American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA), the only autoimmune advocacy organization that encompasses all of the autoimmune diseases, and said, “We have got to find the numbers.” Ladd, a small but determined gray-haired dynamo who had founded the organization, was able to come up with only five thousand dollars to fund the project, a paltry sum in the high-roller arena of scientific research. With that, Rose hired a PhD
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