SLE is difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. Many of the treatments currently administered to sufferers of SLE are nothing more than a shot in the dark. Since SLE can manifest in a multitude of ways, producing many and varied symptoms, attempts to suppress them can often lead to prescribing a dangerous cocktail of drugs, which in themselves may end up aggravating the lupus.

Because it has been nearly 15 years since criteria for diagnosing lupus have been revised, it is quite likely that many individuals suffering from lupus go undetected. This not only means that there is a great deal of unnecessary suffering, but that medical science may be missing out on valuable data which could improve our understanding of this disease.Much of medicine's time and money to date has been spent trying to find the single best method of clinical management, instead of looking at the disease from an epidemiological point of view. All evidence suggests that toxins, whether in the form of allergies, yeast, Staph a. bacteria or medicine, are causing a not so subtle self destruct in possibly one out of every 500 people. The most urgent thing is to research these diseases within the context of the bigger picture of our lives and to find out what toxins in our environment and/or in our systems are making our bodies push the self destruct button.