This recent New York Times article published October 6th, authored by Jane E. Brody and titled An Autoimmune Disorder, in Camouflage is great reading. Here is an excerpt but by all means, read it in it's entirety:
How can a disease that afflicts some three million Americans, 90 percent of them women, be as obscure as Sjögren’s syndrome? Experts say it is one of the three most common autoimmune disorders, but few lay people know of it, and doctors rarely think of it when patients describe its various symptoms.Medical students, even those in postgraduate training, learn little or nothing about Sjögren’s (pronounced SHOW-grins), in which the body attacks its own secretory glands and tissues. Diagnosis can be difficult because symptoms vary widely from patient to patient, and many of those symptoms mimic those of a host of other conditions.As a result, “this major women’s health problem is still largely underdiagnosed and undertreated,” said Dr. Frederick Vivino, a rheumatologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and director of the Penn Sjögren’s Syndrome Center in Philadelphia.
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