**Alice in Wonderland's "Mad Hatter," above, was a caricature of the hat makers of the day who were exposed to mercury vapors in their industry, leading to BRAIN nerve disease, psychosis, and premature death.

Autoimmune diseases arise from an inappropriate immune response of the body against substances and tissues normally present in the body. In other words, the immune system mistakes some part of the body as a pathogen and attacks its own cells. This may be restricted to certain organs (e.g. in autoimmune thyroiditis) or involve a particular tissue in different places (e.g. Goodpasture's disease which may affect the basement membrane in both the lung and the kidney). The treatment of autoimmune diseases is typically with immuno-suppression—medication which decreases the immune response.

Common Sense Translation:   Instead of trusting our immune system to tell us that something is inherently corrupted, we blame AND SHOOT the messenger, rendering it silent.   The genetic knowledge inside the immune system is one half BILLION years worth of information about strategies for survival.  We might consider trusting it...

Hypothesis:  If a body is attacking itself, maybe the immune system has NOT gone awry...  maybe the immune system can see a problem inside the body tissues, a problem which modern medicine is (capable of and yet) not traditionally used to testing for...