According to AARDA, it takes an average of three years (and four doctors) for a sufferer to be given a diagnosis of an autoimmune disease. One reason is that early symptoms can be intermittent and nonspecific. Then, too, a limited amount of autoimmunity itself is not necessarily considered pathological: tests often show the presence of small numbers of antibodies to your own tissues. “Autoimmune disease” is what happens when such autoantibodies produce sustained harm to your body. In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.
