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PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 6:55 pm 
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I have long been very skeptical of the suggested etiology of auto-immune diseases. The established medical thinking is that some how the problem lays with our immune system going bunkers in the case of a disease where a common cause is not apparent. I refer you to the thinking of Paul W. Ewald is an evolutionary biologist:


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That brings us to the concept of autoimmune disease – the idea that the immune system just “goes crazy.” I think the fact that the concept of autoimmunity was developed in the first place is largely related to the fact that our brains have not evolved to think scientifically. People who have studied disease from their own point of view have recognized that the immune system is extremely important. But as we’ve learned more about the immune system, we’ve realized that it is an extremely complicated system – as complicated as the brain. Just like we can’t look at one type of neuron and infer information about the entire brain, we can’t try to understand the characteristics of only some immune cells and think we understand immune function.

So, over the years, as researchers have been daunted by the complexity of the immune system, it has seemed logical that such a complex entity has the potential to go wrong. Because they are limited by the power of their brains, they tend to simplify the issue and view the immune system in the same way they would view a truck that could break down. There are two problems with this type of thinking. For starters, we can’t trust our intuition that something complex is likely to malfunction. The fact is, the immune system functions just fine in a large proportion of the population. The only logical way to explain the immune activation seen in patients with “autoimmune disease” is to suggest that there is some sort of agent pushing the immune system off balance. This argument is only strengthened by the fact that the same evolutionary forces that would cause a serious disease to be weeded from the population would also cause those people whose immune systems are prone to self-destruction to be eliminated from the population.

The concept of autoimmune disease has progressed to the point that now even researchers who previously dismissed the possibility of infection are accepting the possibility that “autoimmune” disease could be triggered by infection. This is some progress, but it’s not enough. Especially since the concept of autoimmunity encourages doctors to prescribe immunosuppressive steroids to patients. But if persistent infection is involved these steroids may exacerbate the fire by allowing pathogens to spread.




From: http://bacteriality.com/2008/02/11/ewald/

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