Women and Autoimmune Disease: The Mysterious Ways Your Body Betrays Itself

This book should be very useful for family and friends of people who suffer from autoimmune diseases, and would like to know more about the illnesses in layman's terms. The first part of the book starts with a description of how the immune system works and how autoimmune diseases are defined, diagnosed and treated. The second part of the book contains one chapter each on the following diseases: antiphospholipid syndrome, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, type 1 juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, PANDAS, streptococcal infection and rheumatic fever, vasculitis, systemic lupus erythematosus, alopecia universalis, Sjogren's syndrome, autoimmune thyroid disease, autoimmune disease of the liver, scleroderma, polymyositis and dermatomyositis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and silicone implant syndrome. Each one of the chapters contains a narrative of a patient's case, diagnosis, symptoms, treatments, pregnancy issues, and variations of the disease. The third part of the book talks about treatments, which includes drugs, alternative and complementary therapies. The author is very good at explaining each one of them and gives his opinion on what works and not according to his experience. Overall, the tone of the book is very optimistic. All the cases included (amalgams of actual cases), have a happy ending. If you have been recently diagnosed with one of the diseases listed above, this book will be useful to give you a view of what's to come. But if you are already deep into research of your illness, this book will be more useful to the people around you to help them understand why you have certain symptoms and learn how to help you cope with them.

This book would be very helpful for a host of autoimmune diseases. The author begins by describing the lymphatic system together with the linkage to the T3, T4 cellular structures. The T cells deal with foreign invaders and antigen identification. The viral profile, stress, genetics, age, lifestyle and the environment are all factors which impact the autoimmune system. Sufferers of autoimmune diseases should avoid environmental toxins (lead-Pb, mercury- Hg. etc.) Muscular sclerosis is a disease classified in the autoimmune category. There are specific strategies to manage the disease by stress avoidance, diet and purging environmental toxins. Modern medicine is beginning to embrace the notion that a whole host of diseases can be managed or controlled successfully in lieu of a cure. For many diseases, there is no cure-per se. The diagnostic and medical monitoring goals are management of pain, disease progression and psycho-social adjustment and functioning. Some of the more exotic treatments involve emcellular transplantation, oxygen therapies and mutiple organ transplants. Genetic engineering is another frontier of medicine in controlling the autoimmune diseases.