THE WORST PREDATOR

Listen. Today, May 10, is World Lupus Day. And I couldn't help but remember that damned Dr. House

Do you remember that phrase he kept repeating?

— It's not lupus, it's never lupus.

He said it for eight seasons. Only once was it actually lupus.

But why did the screenwriters choose this disease for the joke? Because lupus is the closest thing medicine has to a chameleon. With syphilis, at least you need to sleep with someone. For lupus, not even that.

It attacks any part of the body. And meanwhile, it disguises itself. But it also doesn't appear often enough for a doctor to consider it as a first option.

That's why it's the wild card: when no one understands what's wrong with the patient, someone says “lupus.” And almost always, they're wrong.

Name from Latin, means wolf. The first to use it was a 12th-century physician, Rogerius Frugardi. The lesions on the face, on the cheeks, looked like wolf bites to him.

Although with lupus, the wolf doesn't come from outside. The wolf is you. Your immune system, that security guard that should defend you, starts biting inwards.

It inflames the vessels. Whitens the fingers. Triggers clots where they shouldn't be. Ages the arteries prematurely.

Five million people in the world carry a wolf inside. Medicine took seven hundred years to understand that the bite didn't come from outside.