Paul Martin continues "Autoimmunity is thought to play a role in at least twenty (and perhaps in excess of forty) diseases, and the list is growing. etc" 

We can see autoimmunity as a metaphor for the thought process which blocks our understanding that we are essentially human with all the potential of our fundamental biological needs. Disabled in that way we overlook our innate capacity to discriminate between friend and foe, between what's good for us and what is anathema. We are, in effect, in human terms deskilled and reduced. 

 (That  morbidity can be understood psychoanalytically in terms of a cultural rather than  
a mystical collective unconscious. Read this in Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.)  

Wasted like that we believe the discriminatory labels we find hung about our neck by family, apparent friends, teachers and employers. We see ourselves as second class citizens, innately defective, crazy, stupid, slow or lazy; we poison ourselves with a sense of inadequacy, phoney guilt and helplessness; we sell oursleves into a sort of slavery, effectively destitute and dependent with no idea that we can fend for ourselves. 

To compensate for this sense of loss we determine to make something of our lives or waste ourselves away in a mindless search for entertainment, for being happy or acquiring yet more information or knowledge, a sort of addiction. 

This heedless activity is, of course, end driven and bear little or no relation to our biological needs. In that sense it is a metaphorical anorexia nervosa.