well said, its on all the fake self righteousness going around these days.

Even those studies showed such a very minimal improvement in time to healing Villi when a gluten free diet and pred was given. Not consuming gluten is still 100% required for life.

Well sure. I was just pointing out the possibility that a plausible claim might be requested for a TUE for some kind of treatment (be it prednisone or something else) based on an autoimmunity diagnosis. I'm not making that suggestion here in this case and I have no idea of the tricks that get played to justify various treatments. I imagine someone with her work ethic jumping through such dumb hoops to use some questionable marginal intervention that could very well have a confounding effect.

But it's a pretty sick move if that's where some unethical doctors are taking things, to look for illnesses that can provide cover or obfuscate other "treatments". Not only would such an athlete be cheating their competitors but they'd be doing it hiding behind sick people. Sheesh!

The standard explanation I'm familiar with is the "hygiene hypothesis" that goes something like, at any point in our species' history prior to modern times a person would have been bombarded with parasites and chronic infections of other kinds, many of which have evolved defenses that suppress our immune systems. Thanks to our sanitized modern world we no longer have these immune suppressors within us, and therefore our immune systems are hyperactive and looking for trouble, which they find in our own tissues some times, creating the rise in allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Hence kids who grow up on farms playing out side in the dirt and such, and people living in the developing world where these infections are still common, seem to have much lower rates of allergies and autoimmune diseases than first world city slickers.