bluebird

A Case of Autoimmune Illness - SLE

A woman we’ll call Gail first came to see me about 8 months ago after being diagnosed with Lupus. Apparently, it had been coming on over the last year. Normally a high energy ‘doer’, she had been extremely fatigued, feeling like she ‘weighed 400 pounds’. Then a few weeks before our visit, around the time of a stressful holiday, she woke one morning with excruciating pain throughout her body. It was, she explained, as if her soft tissue was ‘singing’.

‘Lupus’ is short for ‘lupus erythematosus’, which is not a single disease entity, but actually a number of autoimmune diseases that attack various parts of the body. The name is a Latin term dating back to the 13th century referring to the red skin lesions that at the time where thought to look like the bite of a wolf.1