The Guard Who Turned Thief: Understanding Autoimmune Disease

This article first appeared in Kannada in ಕ್ಷ ಕಿರಣ, Dr Shashikiran Umakanth’s column in the Vishwavani daily. The Inside Story is its English edition. ಈ ಲೇಖನವನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಓದಿ

What should the body’s defence system be like? Think of a faithful dog that guards your house.

When a thief or a stranger comes in from outside, in our case bacteria and viruses, the dog should bark, bite and drive them away. But when it sees the people of the house, it should wag its tail and behave itself.

Now imagine that this faithful guard dog suddenly loses its head. It decides that the people of its own house are thieves, and it starts biting them. What then?

Our immune system is the body’s defence force, and its job is to kill the enemies that come from outside. Sometimes it gets badly confused. It decides that the healthy parts of our own body do not belong to us, that they are outside enemies, and it begins to attack them! In medical language this is called an autoimmune disease. In Kannada we say svayam nirodhaka kayile, a disease in which the body turns its defences against itself. The shield that was meant to protect us has become a sword that cuts us. That is the story of autoimmune disease.

More Than Eighty Faces

There are more than 80 kinds of autoimmune disease. The name of the illness changes with the part of the body that comes under attack.

• When the defence force attacks our joints, it is rheumatoid arthritis.
• When it attacks the cells that give our skin its colour, the result is vitiligo, the white patches. When it turns on the skin itself, the result can be psoriasis.
• When it destroys the cells in the pancreas that make insulin, it is type 1 diabetes.
• When it troubles the thyroid gland, it is Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

And the list does not end there. It is a long one, and it keeps growing!

Why does this happen? Why did the guard get confused? Nobody knows the exact reason. Genes, some viral infections around us, and the heavy mental stress of the way we live today all add up, and together they turn the head of the defence system.

What Is the Remedy?

If the guard dog is biting the family, can we simply shoot it? No! If the dog dies, real thieves will walk into the house with ease. In the body, that means other infections will come in. So we cannot destroy the defence system completely.

What we can do is give the dog a little “medicine”, cool its temper, calm it down and put it to rest. The immunosuppressant and steroid tablets that doctors prescribe do exactly this job. They keep the defence force’s excess anger under control.

The Mind and the Illness

These diseases and the mind are tied together by a knot that cannot be undone. However costly the tablets we swallow, if there is a great deal of tension in the mind, the guard dog loses its head again and again, and the disease is more likely to flare up once more.

So a person with an autoimmune disease must change the way they live. Some exercise every day, some meditation, good sleep, and always a “smile” on the face. When you bring your tension down, the “guard” inside you also stays cool!