The Myth of Normal 63

vessels. Like many others, Williams was relieved to finally learn there was some objective reason, and even a name, for her physical tribulations. In Mee Ok’s case it fell to the patient herself to make the diagnosis: a notunusual role reversal in the internet age, particularly in cases where doctors have already thrown up their hands. “My body just continued to stiffen,” she recalled. “It was like it was undergoing mummification, like a selfmummification over time. It kept spreading and spreading throughout my body, and the pain was just unbelievable . . . They were giving me steroids and telling me that it was something that I would have to maintain, that the arthritis would never be cured—it wasn’t curable. I insisted on being tested for scleroderma, and that was when I found out my diagnosis: six months after the symptoms started.” Autoimmune diseases are among the great unsolved mysteries of the medical profession. Most are considered “idiopathic” in nature, which simply means “of unknown origin.” Naturally, if we cannot identify the cause of a condition, we will be stymied in our efforts to cure or reverse it. In many cases symptom suppression or, sometimes, surgical repair or removal of damaged tissue is the most modern medicine can offer. Such measures do afford welcome relief to many, but they cannot reverse the course of disease and, as with Mee Ok, leave a great number of people consigned to prolonged deterioration and disability. Troubling as this lack of clarity is for doctors and patients alike, these illnesses also present a number of other head-scratchers, scientifically speaking. The first mystery is why they are becoming more frequent. Across many Western countries, rates of everything from celiac disease to IBD, from lupus to type 1 diabetes, and even allergies, are steadily rising, stymieing researchers.[2] “In the last half-century, the prevalence of autoimmune disease . . . has increased sharply in the developed world,” a 2016 New York Times article noted. “An estimated one in 13 Americans has one of these often debilitating, generally lifelong conditions.”[3] In the U.K., the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease increased more than threefold between 1994 and 2014,[4] while in Canada the rate of IBD in children grew by over 7 percent a year