When your disease is hard to name and doesn’t have visible symptoms, it can be difficult for others to understand that you are sick. Many people with autoimmune diseases live with this on a daily basis.
When people don’t know much about your disease, it can be hard to explain it to family and friends. This sentiment is particularly true for people living with autoimmune diseases like lupus or multiple sclerosis (MS) – where the condition is chronic but achieving a specific diagnosis may take time, the diagnosis may change, symptoms may not be overtly apparent, and, in many cases, both a cause and a ‘cure’ are unknown.
‘But you don’t look sick?’ is something patients with autoimmune conditions hear regularly – as they live with ‘hidden symptoms’ such as chronic pain or mobility problems.
A new Drexel University study found that one way patients and physicians can work through the difficulty and frustration of communicating about these conditions is to use both broad diagnostic terms, like ‘autoimmune disease’, as well as narrow ones, such as “lupus or MS”.
Kelly Joyce, professor in Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Center for Science, Technology & Society, has researched the experiences of people diagnosed with autoimmune illnesses.
In analysing how people live with autoimmune illnesses, Joyce and former Drexel graduate student Melanie Jeske found that the use of a broad category – like ‘autoimmune’ – provides continuity, certainty and even community for patients who struggle to convey their often-inconsistent illness experiences with clinicians, family and friends.
Joyce’s research showed that both broad diagnostic classifications and narrow diagnostic classifications are integral to diagnostic work and illness experiences.
Communicating a patient’s illness
Researchers found that participants, regardless of gender, age or specific disease diagnosis, tended to use the broad category ‘autoimmune’ in addition to a specific diagnosis, like Celiac disease or Rheumatoid arthritis, to talk about their health.
Some of the reasons they used the terminology were to describe what’s happening in their bodies, and to make it easier to provide continuity, even when there was a change in their specific diagnosis.
“Although friends and families may not understand the precise mechanisms of Lupus or Rheumatoid arthritis, for example, they could understand the general autoimmune process in which the body’s immune systems attacks healthy tissue and cells,” Joyce said.
The broad term also simplified the process of talking about the disease to friends and family, even as the specific diagnosis might change over time.
“Use of the category ‘autoimmune’ meant participants did not have to put their lives on hold even as aspects of their specific diagnosis changed from ulcerative colitis to Crohn’s disease, from lupus to mixed connective tissue disease (MCT), from one type of MS or lupus to another type of MS or lupus, and from having MS to not having MS to having MS,” said Joyce. “Autoimmune, although an umbrella or broad category, is productive for those experiencing illness, lending legitimacy to the symptoms that a person will experience.”
It can also help to distinguish their affliction from others that are more stigmatised. One specific example of this was that participants who live with Type 1 diabetes – which is an autoimmune disease – who use the broad terminology to distinguish their illness from type 2 diabetes; chronic condition caused by the body’s inability to metabolise sugar. This is a way for patients to avoid the stigma and blame often associated with the latter.
Raising awareness
Research has shown that people who are ill can benefit from social support when their disease is widely recognised.
For example, there is often an outpouring of support during the various cancer and disease awareness months and efforts – both broadly in society and at an individual level. This unifying support can be difficult for illnesses like autoimmune disease that is not as well understood in society.
The researchers suggest that recognising that autoimmune can be a range of diseases and disorders – similar to the way we think about the autism spectrum – could aid our collective understanding of these diseases and support for those who are suffering from it.
The importance of ‘broad categories’
The study suggests that the label autoimmune provides, at minimum, some understanding and a scientific explanation as to what is happening to patients, though an exact diagnosis may be a moving target.
Joyce said: “Within medicine, clinicians and researchers use the language of lumping and splitting to distinguish between two valuable diagnostic classification practices.
“The process of lumping creates broad categories and emphasises connections. In contrast, splitting emphasises the differences between illnesses, creating categories that tend to be narrow and more specialised, prioritising difference rather than similarity.”
Sociologists study how clinical encounters and medical practice are social practices, that is, practices imbued with values, beliefs, and institutional and policy incentives. Yet, many sociologists who study diagnostic practices have yet to acknowledge the importance of broad categories in diagnostic work, according to Joyce.
She continued: “They focus on how clinicians and patients use narrow diagnostic labels, missing the importance of broad categories. Sociologists who study how people live with illnesses tend to focus on life after a specific diagnosis, so they have also paid little attention to the importance of broad categories in medical practice.”
Joyce suggests clinicians should consider presenting patients with both broad and narrow disease classifications when discussing autoimmune diagnoses initially and over time.
The use of the broad category may provide continuity and certainty in doctor-patient communications even as narrow disease diagnoses change or when symptoms do not map neatly into diagnostic tests or markers.
Some health care organisations are taking the lead and reorganising the delivery of services in recognition of the changing diagnoses and, at times, unknowable, dimensions of autoimmune illnesses. As an example of this reorganisation, West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania opened the first institute dedicated to autoimmune illnesses in February 2018.
