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How Many Diseases Are There You Never Heard Of?
There are a LOT of them! But you don’t often need to worry about them.
There are over a thousand rare diseases that most of us will never encounter or ever have to deal with or experience. They can range from dramatic, painful and agonizing short-term conditions that end in premature death to a chronic long-term disability with no cure in sight. For the person and their caregivers who are suffering from these conditions, life is often a constant battle.
Just recently I encountered one and it kind of took me by surprise.
I was talking with a good friend of mine and he was showing me how his hand was deformed and I said, “Oh, you’re getting arthritis, right?” and he said “No. It’s not arthritis.”
I said “It looks like arthritis.”
He said it’s “Dupuytren’s Disease.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he said as I had never heard the disease mentioned before and he had never referred to it so I asked him to spell it. I knew I would never remember it so I asked him to send me a link to it so I could learn more about it.
And he did. Here’s the link.
