> Is there evidence of a well-defined psychological mechanism rather than merely a symptom cluster common to autoimmune diseases and various other immune system disorders?
Are you asking if all autoimmune diseases can be detected by a single test. That doesn't really seem relevant. To my knowledge, all of the diseases that are confidently attributed to an autoimmune disorder do indeed have corresponding physiological evidence, with higher degrees of confidence when there are independent pieces of direct evidence. (One can imagine a case where there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence instead, but I've never heard of it; maybe you have an example in mind?) Autoimmune diseases generally have multiple common physiological features like excess inflammation, responsiveness to steroids (which suppress the immume system), or antinuclear antibodies (ANA).
The rest of your comment was much more helpful. Thanks! (Except for the part where you said I made accusations. I didn't.)
> Lupus was known about for centuries, but only conclusively proven to be an autoimmune disease in 1948-49.
Right, there are obviously lots of physiological diseases whose underlying causes aren't understood for a long time. But Lupus had objective (non-self-report) symptoms, giving doctors confidence in it was physiological. They were correctly unsure it was autoimmune until later evidence became available.
> The medical community is at a consensus that there's an organic cause,
Could you link to a consensus statement? I looked around a lot and all the documents i could find that reflect a consensus of experts like the CDC (rather than the opinion of individual researchers) were careful to never endorse a physiological mechanism, even an unknown one.
> ...they just don't have enough data collated or a good enough understanding of the immune system and its interaction with the disease process to know what it is
Sorry, are you saying there is a consensus it's autoimmune, or just biological? There appear to be lots of non-autoimmune theories too.
Are you asking if all autoimmune diseases can be detected by a single test. That doesn't really seem relevant. To my knowledge, all of the diseases that are confidently attributed to an autoimmune disorder do indeed have corresponding physiological evidence, with higher degrees of confidence when there are independent pieces of direct evidence. (One can imagine a case where there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence instead, but I've never heard of it; maybe you have an example in mind?) Autoimmune diseases generally have multiple common physiological features like excess inflammation, responsiveness to steroids (which suppress the immume system), or antinuclear antibodies (ANA).
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/ana-test/about/p...
The rest of your comment was much more helpful. Thanks! (Except for the part where you said I made accusations. I didn't.)
> Lupus was known about for centuries, but only conclusively proven to be an autoimmune disease in 1948-49.
Right, there are obviously lots of physiological diseases whose underlying causes aren't understood for a long time. But Lupus had objective (non-self-report) symptoms, giving doctors confidence in it was physiological. They were correctly unsure it was autoimmune until later evidence became available.
> The medical community is at a consensus that there's an organic cause,
Could you link to a consensus statement? I looked around a lot and all the documents i could find that reflect a consensus of experts like the CDC (rather than the opinion of individual researchers) were careful to never endorse a physiological mechanism, even an unknown one.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-announces-...
https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/about/index.html
> ...they just don't have enough data collated or a good enough understanding of the immune system and its interaction with the disease process to know what it is
Sorry, are you saying there is a consensus it's autoimmune, or just biological? There appear to be lots of non-autoimmune theories too.