What the latest autoimmune research reveals about medical dismissal, childhood adaptations and the extraordinary relationship between our minds and bodies.
The danger of using psychology to explain away biology is that we risk dismissing genuine physical illness. Yet the irony is that psychology and biology are intimately connected. Our experiences, emotions, nervous systems, hormones and immune systems are in constant communication (hence the field of study: psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology). So I got to thinking; perhaps the real problem lies in the lens through which we're interpreting psychology itself. Rather than using it to bring medical enquiry to an end, what if we used it to understand more about the human being experiencing the illness?
This month, a headline about women's health brought this paradox into sharp focus.
On 13 October 2026, The Guardian reported that women with autoimmune conditions were significantly more likely than men to have their symptoms attribut...
