Another difficulty in diagnosing autoimmune diseases is that they often present as a systemic illness, with symptoms occurring in different parts of the body, and yet our health care system is very siloed. Patients often end up consulting different specialists for different symptoms, with no one taking a big-picture look at the patient’s illness, unless a primary care doctor has the time to puzzle it out. One woman I interviewed told me she was referred, over time, to a dermatologist, an endocrinologist, an immunologist, and a neurologist. She felt that each doctor she saw was just checking
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