Autoimmune Disease Book Review
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| Wed, 01-19-2005 - 8:49am |
I just finished reading "Women and Autoimmune Disease" by Robert Lahita, and posted the following review in amazon.com:
This book should be very useful for family and friends of people who suffer from autoimmune diseases, and would like to know more about the illnesses in layman’s terms.
The first part of the book starts with a description of how the immune system works and how autoimmune diseases are defined, diagnosed and treated.
The second part of the book contains one chapter each on the following diseases: antiphospholipid syndrome, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, type 1 juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, PANDAS, streptococcal infection and rheumatic fever, vasculitis, systemic lupus erythematosus, alopecia universalis, Sjogren’s syndrome, autoimmune thyroid disease, autoimmune disease of the liver, scleroderma, polymyositis and dermatomyositis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and silicone implant syndrome. Each one of the chapters contains a narrative of a patient’s case, diagnosis, symptoms, treatments, pregnancy issues, and variations of the disease.
The third part of the book talks about treatments, which includes drugs, alternative and complementary therapies. The author is very good at explaining each one of them and gives his opinion on what works and not according to his experience.
Overall, the tone of the book is very optimistic. All the cases included (amalgams of actual cases), have a happy ending.
If you have been recently diagnosed with one of the diseases listed above, this book will be useful to give you a view of what’s to come. But if you are already deep into research of your illness, this book will be more useful to the people around you to help them understand why you have certain symptoms and learn how to help you cope with them.
| Wed, 01-19-2005 - 11:39pm |
