--anecdotally, at least, there seem to be an awful lot of people out there with multiple allergies who get suspected autoimmune neuropathy.

Of course, there are a lot of allergic people out there who DON'T get such neuropathies. But I wonder how many/few people who are not generally allergic develop such syndromes, or, indeed, develop any autoimmune conditons. My supposition is that people with "reactive" immune systems--which may well have conferred a survival advantage in the past--have higher rates of these things than those who don't have such reactivity.

Of course, the problem now is that there are so many more things in our environment to react to, chemically, than there were a few centuries ago. It's very much like Type II diabetes--the tendency to store fat, a genetic advantage (to make up for lean times) for much of our evolutionary history, becomes a disadvantage when modern agricultural methods dump cheap simple carbohydrates on our plates, and we don't have to engage in the rate of physical activity our ancestors did.