We devoted an entire chapter of Keep Working, Girlfriend! talking about the nature of autoimmune illness, how it impacts women, and what happens in your body to make it go so haywire. It might seem like overkill for a book focused on working, so I thought I’d explain why we kicked off the book with this topic.
Until I worked on this chapter I pretty much lived in the world of my own illness, Crohn’s Disease. In order to write the chapter I read a couple of books on the subject, including Women and Autoimmune Disease by Robert G. Lahita, MD. Reading these books opened my eyes to some mind-staggering numbers. First of all, there are at least 63 Autoimmune Diseases (AD’s) and an estimated 14-22 million people are living with some form of AD - more than twice the number of people with some form of cancer. The information in Lahita’s book is based on numbers from a 1997 census, so the numbers may be greater now.
Furthermore, many more than half the people with an AD are women. Autoimmune diseases happen to hit women most often during their child bearing years, meaning during the prime of their working lives.
If 5-8% of the population are impacted by AD’s (again 1997 numbers), and more than half are women, we thought we should explain what’s happening to some of us.
Joan
I’m sure you’ve already found her but Kerri Morrone has a great blog on living and thriving with Type 1 diabetes. Just thought I’d toss that up there for you.