Thank-you for your thoughts and for explaining your own personal coping strategies. I think that acceptance of the kind you suggest is productive to an extent - but I am absolutely not ready to accept this degree of pain and uncertainty at the age of 52 - when I have masses I still want to achieve and a reasonably good quality of life to try and get back to.

I am not a religious person but I do believe in positivity and creativity as my signature below hopefully suggests. However I get really fed up with being told to accept this stuff as a product of my body degenerating. No one else I know (and I have many older friends, some of whom drink a lot and smoke and eat bad foods) spends their waking life feeling as if they are up to the top of their thighs in cold water with little crabs crawling up their legs while standing on burning hot coals. Or if they do and are more stoical than I am then so be it. But I believe that medical science needs people who don't accept this state of affairs too readily.

I live an extremely healthy life, practice yoga daily and eat and drink like a paragon of virtue for all the good it does me so I am not ready to take up the Budhist philosophy you suggest and nor do I think that I should have to! So I am really looking for answers rather than looking for emotional support or suggestions for adopting philospophical or religious approaches - because I want to understand and overcome at least some of this lousy autoimmune stuff if possible. If I felt that this predicament was all just about ageing, as I do with my osteoarthritis, then I would accept it and do my best. But this stuff is the stuff of bad dreams and I don't think it is simply to do with the ageing process. Accepting this would be to accept a life sentence and that would be extremely depressing. Ageing doesn't have to be depressing.