system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Immunologists: If you have an autoimmune disorder, are you more resistent against normal infections?

So my (admittedly trivial) understand of autoimmune disorders is that your immune system, for one reason or another, becomes over-active and starts attacking your own body's cells, having mistaken them for a foreign body. 

This got me thinking about a couple major questions:

1. If you were to occupy your immune system with pathogens of another kind, would that relieve the symptoms of the disorder?
2. Would you be more resistent to "standard" pathogens?

tl;dr If you have lupus: does that make you wolverine?
gpt
1) There have been cases in history where certain disease states prevent acquisition of other disease states, but typically it is when one infection causes antibodies and an immune response that fight off another similar infection by accident.  Your immune system can fight off more than one pathogen, even if it thinks your own body is a pathogen.  Thank god! because at any point you are fighting off a ton of tiny little pathogens trying to make you sick.

2) Not unless the pathogen happened to be identical to whatever it was in your body that is being attacked by your own immune system.  So basically no.

3) Lupus is a term referring to many different possible mutations that end up with your body attacking itself in many different ways and in various organ systems.