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How is it I've heard of all kinds of largely non-existent (today) diseases like Cholera, Typhus, Typhoid, Scrofula, Gout, etc, but as soon as I got on the internet, everyone seems to have Crohn's, which I had never heard of pre-internet?

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People don't talk about it. I have two friends with it, and I knew both of them for years before they told me.

Zerohp is right. They don't. It is estimated there are 1.4 million people with Crohn's & Colitis in the United States. But because most people who have it don't talk about it, people go on suffering in silence.

One reason people don't talk about it is because it's not "dinner table conversation".

In addition to zerohp's point, other possibilities include improving detection ability and it being a "disease of civilization": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_diseases

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