Occasionally in modern medicine, there are still actually new diseases. When a new disease is described, such as AIDS in the 1980s, it is remarkable how quickly the medical community attacks the problem, learns the cause, and starts to develop treatments. What once took decades, now takes only a few years. For example, the first cases of AIDS were being described in 1981 and by 1987 successful trials of the drug AZT had begun.
A new disease in Dermatology:
In 2000 the first report was published describing a new disease in dermatology and a group of fifteen patients who had it. The disease consisted of a hardening of the skin of the hands and feet in patients who had end-stage renal disease and who were receiving dialysis. The hardening of the skin was progressive in many patients causing loss of mobility of the joints, leaving them in pain and often unable to walk or use their fingers and hands. The cause was not dialysis, because dialysis has been around for decades and this disease, called nephrogenic fibrosing dermopathy (NFD), was not seen until 2000.
In 2005 a registry was created to track patients with this new disease and more than 170...