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FYI: Just want to share Scott's story!  Your thoughts.

When Scott Jorgensen stepped onto the scales last Friday, alert fans on the UG noticed a couple of changes. One, he had some new ink on his chest. And, two, his vitiligo, or, as an astute UGer put it “speckled with awesome,” appeared to have disappeared.

Vitiligo (pronounced vit-ill-EYE-go) is a disorder in which the cells that make pigment in the skin are destroyed. As a result, white patches appear on the skin.

Between one to two million people in the USA have the disorder. The cause is unknown.

This image was take in June of 2011, at UFC 131.

This image was taken Friday.

It figures that a fighter’s response to a disease would be extreme. Ben Fowlkes has the story.

Scott Jorgensen’s vitiligo condition is especially pronounced in the places where he was repeatedly grabbed during college wrestling and MMA training. He didn’t care enough about aesthetics to stop training because of it, but when he was a junior in college, his mother fought with her insurance company to get them to cover a laser treatment that was supposed to help it.

“I went once, and it was worse than getting tattooed,” Jorgensen said.

From that point on he figured he’d just live with it, but doctors had told him he had a particularly aggressive case of vitiligo. Turns out they were right, Jorgensen said, because now it “pretty much just took over.”

That’s why when Jorgensen came out there were no more splotches. His skin seemed to have gone completely pale, which left some people wondering if he’d sought medical treatment for it. In fact, Jorgensen said, he’d done the opposite, simply allowing the vitiligo to run rampant. The upside was that it made his many tattoos appear that much brighter, because “literally I have no pigment in my skin, so it’s like coloring on a white piece of paper.”