As physicians, we are trained to dissect symptoms and to hunt for a diagnosis. But my own journey with Sjogren’s, like my patients’, wasn’t a textbook case. It was a puzzle with pieces scattered over decades, ignored or dismissed at each turn, including by myself.

There’s the college student, fearing the agony a simple meal might bring, never dreaming of asking why. The med student, convinced of an impending heart attack, was told by her mother (and, by extension, the medical mindset she was steeped in) that it’s “all in your head.” The overworked intern masked her back pain with ibuprofen, never getting a proper workup.

It wasn’t until a concerned dental hygienist mentioned my dry mouth that the pieces started to click. Even armed with my medical degrees, I was 35 before I was forced to confront the fact that I wasn’t the “invincible” doctor-mom; I was the patient.

Confirmation brought relief, then the fear of Sjogren’s systemic implications. Exhaustion unlike any I’d witnessed in patients. Fevers that raged, jaundice followed by a liver biopsy— all required my physician connections and a few cell phone numbers to advocate for timely care. After the dust settled, this made me wonder, what happens to those without my knowledge or immense privilege? How many are dismissed as anxious or bounced between specialists with normal labs? A lot since an estimated 40 percent are seronegative.

Sjogren’s taught me more about medicine than any textbook. It made me question the system I’m both a product of and a victim of. The outdated stereotypes based on our multiple-choice board exam answers need to go along with the outdated term of the syndrome. Sjogren’s is a serious systemic disease. We need doctors who listen beyond the obvious and who aren’t afraid of the messy, multi-system complaints that don’t fit the mold. Who instead of throwing their hands up in the air while placing yet another referral, get curious. Sjogren’s’ can hide behind one in a hundred faces, and too many go unseen. In fact, 75 percent of those with Sjogren’s remain undiagnosed.

As we conclude another Sjogren’s Awareness Month, I challenge my colleagues to think beyond dry eyes and dry mouth. Consider the young woman with fatigue, the middle-aged man with joint pain, and the one labeled with fibromyalgia. It could be Sjogren’s, and that diagnosis matters. This is more true now than ever with multiple promising treatments in phase 3 trials.

My voice carries the dual weight of doctor and patient. It’s a testament to the gaps in our knowledge and a frustrated plea to the healers I trained alongside. Imagine a world where Sjogren’s is no longer an invisible illness, where swift diagnosis minimizes damage and offers hope. It starts with changing our mindsets, and as colleagues, we owe that to our patients and to ourselves. After all, the line between doctor and patient is thinner than we think.

Kara Wada is a quadruple board-certified pediatric and adult allergy and immunology, lifestyle, and functional medicine physician, a Sjögren’s disease specialist, and a Sjögren’s patient herself. She spent nine years on faculty at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where she served as associate program director of the allergy and immunology fellowship and led the Mast Cell Center of Excellence.

In 2025, she left academic medicine to build the kind of practice she could not find as a patient: the Immune Confident Institute, a national direct-care immunology practice licensed in 27 states. She treats the patients the health care system sends ping-ponging between specialists, people with complex, chronic, multisystem disease including mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), dysautonomia, Sjögren’s disease, immune dysfunction, and the seronegative and “in-between” diagnoses that do not fit neatly into a single specialty.

Her premise is simple: These patients are not the problem. Fragmented care is. Medicine has become exceptionally good at looking through microscopes while losing sight of the telescope, the bigger picture of the person in front of us. Her work challenges a health care culture that demands compliance when it should assume competence, and aims to make strategic, compassionate immune-directed care the standard, and the exam room a place where patients are finally seen, heard, and believed.

Most of her reach is built outside the exam room. Her YouTube channel drew roughly two million views this past year, and more than 100,000 people follow her work across platforms, including a Sjögren’s community of about 6,600. She founded and hosts the Virtual Sjögren’s Summit, now in its sixth year and drawing some 4,300 registrants worldwide. She appears regularly on national television and in the health press, including Prevention, SELF, Good Housekeeping, WebMD, Medscape, and MedPage Today, and she writes for KevinMD on the diagnoses that live in the shadows and the medical gaslighting that surrounds them.

A TEDx speaker and sought-after keynote, Wada speaks to clinician and patient audiences about complex immune disease, the experience of being disbelieved, and what changes when the physician is also the patient. She is also an unlikely pageant titleholder, having served as Dr. Ohio America 2022 and Dr. Midwest America 2023, and has written about how pageantry sharpened skills medicine rewards but rarely teaches.

She earned her medical degree with honors from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and completed internal medicine-pediatrics residency, allergy and immunology fellowship, and clinician educator fellowship at The Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her medical school sweetheart turned husband, Akira, and their three children.