Autoimmune disease What to do when your body fights itself

Diagnosis can be difficult as you might have vague symptoms & look fine from the outside

The human body has an amazing ability to bring complex biological processes together to work in harmony so that disease and infection are kept at bay. But sometimes things don’t work as they should, and your immune system can end up turning its defences on itself.

An autoimmune disorder is when a person’s immune system mistakenly attacks his or her own body. There are more than 80 different autoimmune diseases that range in severity from mild to disabling. Some of the ones you might have heard of include inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), type 1 diabetes, coeliac disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, psoriasis