A new claim is doing the rounds online: that women who are too nice risk getting an autoimmune disease. And while aspects of this message are clearly dubious, there’s a reason it is resonating Women, a warning from Instagram : “You really need to be a bitch or you’re going to develop an autoimmune disease. It’s that simple.” Versions of this scientifically dubious statement have caught the imagination of a corner of the internet, getting algorithmically nudged my way multiple times (a TikTok to this effect has 40,000 likes; a Threads post 26,000). Sometimes, it’s set to music; sometimes, it’s the basis for earnest discussion of cortisol and inflammation. Sometimes, it’s evangelical. One woman claims that, “Being a bitch healed my autoimmune disease,” adding: “Being the ‘love and light’ spiritual girlie is probably the reason why you feel depressed and you have IBS.” A Substack evokes the need to break the “good girl contract”, talking about those for whom “setting boundaries, getting ferocious about protecting their own bodies, minds, souls … sometimes allowed the nervous system to settle enough that the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms could kick in and heal”. As a woman with an autoimmune condition (alopecia), this resonates on a woo-woo level: my hair fell out when I was trying and failing to reconcile incompatible demands; to make everyone happy. It’s also, I recognise, deeply silly. For a start, “women” – yes, all of us – needing to do something, or be a certain way, is a wild generalisation. It’s also definitively not “that simple”, and I would hate to upset a whole community of intellectually rigorous immunologists. I imagine them rhythmically banging their heads against their keyboards, muttering about there being no peer-reviewed cohort studies interrogating the relationship between “being the love and light spiritual girlie”, or putting too many exclamation markers and conciliatory qualifiers in emails, and autoimmune disease. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...