Autoimmune Disease Quotes

“God whispered, "You endured a lot. For that I am truly sorry, but grateful. I needed you to struggle to help so many. Through that process you would grow into who you have now become. Didn't you know that I gave all my struggles to my favorite children? One only needs to look at the struggles given to your older brother Jesus to know how important you have been to me.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“As with many life-altering events, an autoimmune illness is almost guaranteed to cause you to re-evaluate your priorities.”
― Joan Friedlander, Women, Work, and Autoimmune Diease

“And so it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“There is a loneliness to illness, a child's desire to be pitied and seen. But it is precisely this recognition that is elusive. How can you explain and identify your condition if not one has any grasp of what it is you suffer from and the symptoms wax and wane? How do you describe a disease that's not always there?”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“I know many people who are suspicious of diagnoses—they think of them as labels that reduce or stigmatize. I knew, already, that a diagnosis was not going to answer all my questions. But I craved a diagnosis because it is a form of understanding.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“The 40-hour work week, long considered the gold standard, has quietly and insidiously stretched into 50 to 60 hours. Despite this accepted practice, social commentators and the average person agree that functioning at such a pace can't possibly be good for one's mental or physical health. /So I ask you: if the expanded work-week isn't healthy for someone in good physical condition, how can it possibly be acceptable for someone with a chronic illness? Quite simply, it's not.”
― Rosalind Joffe, Women, Work, and Autoimmune Disease: Keep Working, Girlfriend!

“Some of us fall through the unseen cracks in the world of health on a bright summer’s day through a run-in with machine or microbe, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Some of us were born this way. And some find out that our genes have hidden within them a ticking time bomb. Waiting. Silently.
However we got here, we are now inhabitants of the state of sickness. Our papers for the world of health have been rescinded without notice. Our body-world has been colonised by patriarchs, and we, the natives, should know our place: small folded patient, compliant, silent, not defiant.
They seem to believe that our bodies are just an errant version of theirs. That our souls are not woman-shaped on the inside. That it’s not our place to take our space and insist on our inner difference.
Their gospel is scribbled down on prescription pads in spider scrawl. They are not to be questioned, especially not with our own heresy.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing

“The bottom line is this: environmental toxins are all around us, and they stimulate the production of free radicals, which can cause axidative damage to any kind of cell, be it muscle, nerve, liver, kidney,, heart, brain, and so on, and cause autoimmune disease.”
― Stephen B. Edelson, M. D.

“I am, you are, a cell in a bigger living organism. We have been taught to forget this. But our bodies are remembering.
We are not the only ones who are suffering. We are not the only ones who are sick.
But we are the ones with the power to make a change.
The time has come to take back our power to heal from this sickness.
This is the time to heal. It is time to purge the toxic masculine from our bodies and beings. And to choose life.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing

“Labelling a woman as a hypochondriac is the modern day way of labelling a woman hysterical – the insinuation is that it is all in her mind, she is unstable (mentally and perhaps physically) her opinion and feelings are not to be trusted. Her pain and her concerns are not real.
But what if the hypochondriac, the highly sensitive woman, is picking up perfectly on the signs that something is wrong, she is registering the imbalance, that something is wrong, but she mistakes the issue as being in her own body, rather than the body of the world beyond her. She is told to quiet down, that nothing is wrong. But there is, she knows there is. This is why the constant reassurance does little to help her. She is feeling, deep in her bones, in her nerves, in her pulse that something is seriously wrong. Because it is. Her biological system may or may not have gotten sick from it yet, but the signs of a sick world are quickening within her.”
― Lucy H. Pearce , Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing

“Autoimmunity is internalized by patients as an opportunity for the ultimate self-management project. But in fact it is a manifestation of a flawed collective project. If it is an indictment of anything, it is an indictment not of our personhood but of our impulse to see social problems as being about our personhood, instead of a consequence of our collective shortcomings as co-citizens of this place and time.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“Someday, we'll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we're not there yet.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, "I don't know what's wrong with you." And so we stood together in a tiny antiseptic room, the doctor and patient, a world apart.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“We are learning that before the body can become a temple, it first must become our home.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing

“Colin had just accomplished the impossible. He had broken down the walls around my heart. The walls I had been building far before my illnesses but had grown even sturdier since my diagnosis. And for the first time, it felt like I'd been set free.”
― Brooke Gilbert, The Paris Soulmate

“...many patients with MC have actually been diagnosed with other autoimmune syndromes, only to discover that when they were able to control their MC symptoms, those other autoimmune issues disappeared.”
― Wayne Persky, Microscopic Colitis: Revised Edition

“At the most basic level, scientists are discovering that nearly all of the chronic diseases that cause so much suffering and are steadily driving up the cost of health care all share mitochondrial dysfunction, excessive inflammation, high cortisol levels, and other markers of broken biochemistry. In a very real sense, we all have the same disease because all diseases begin with broken, incorrect biochemistry and disordered communication within and between our cells. For health to return, the chemistry must revert to normal, and communication within and between our cells must be restored. This is true for every disease.”
― Terry Wahls, The Wahls Protocol : How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine

“Certainly since the Middle Ages we have covered a lot of (medical) ground, gathered an enormous quantity of knowledge and as a result we have so much knowledge that we reach the point of being able to connect the available knowledge, bringing it together. This would foster a deeper insight of the human body and be helpful to develop an overview of the body. The connectivity of knowledge is what this book is about.”
― Martine F. Delfos

“In medical science most if the progress comes from three sources with their multiple specialisations. First>/i> is the specific knowledge about a part or a system of the body. Second the knowledge to assess wether some part or system of the body is malfunctioning or defective, 'broken' . Third is how to repair what is not functioning well or no longer functioning well or is even absent. But there are other sources of progress. Naturally, after discovering a part of the body and starting to understand its function and malfunction, the next step would be to focus on the prevention of malfunction of that part of the body. This presents a fourth source still in full development which is preventive medicine. Then there is a fifth source about the interactions between all parts and systems of the body together, which is slowly developing.”
― Martine F. Delfos, Autoimmune Reactions and the Immune System

“He had to know, on some level, that this trip was either a celebration of improvement in health, or a last hurrah. And he still had yet to find out which one it was.”
― Brooke Gilbert

“That’s not baggage. It’s not acceptable to call your illnesses baggage.”
― Brooke Gilbert, The Paris Soulmate

“It was like I was sick with a new disorder and the diagnosis was Colin.”
― Brooke Gilbert, The Paris Soulmate

“I had fought for this moment. I had fought for my life, what health I had, the ability to live my life, and the ability to love. And he was worth every moment I had fought so hard for. I never could have imagined what I was truly fighting so desperately for. But there he sat.”
― Brooke Gilbert, The Paris Soulmate

“As the chronically ill know, to be alive is to be in uncertainty.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness