Mr. Moderate

We all know the classic image of the ostrich with its head in the sand while its body is exposed to whatever comes along. In our culture, we interpret this image as a refusal to see the obvious. Well, Lyme Disease exists, but 9,999 out of 10,000 doctors have their heads in the sand when it comes to properly diagnosing and treating Lyme Disease. But anybody can go on the Internet and find a picture of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria which causes Lyme Disease. It shows that the organism is a spirochete, or “corkscrew-shaped” bacteria. How can Lyme Disease not exist? This gets to be a real mystery, so please read on.

This is the first of a two-post set, the other of which discusses the claims by Michael Savage that the mental diseases of autism and ADHD are vastly over-diagnosed in this country. As I say at the end of that other post, what is totally a mystery to me is this: Why does the establishment (schools, doctors, drug companies, etc.) want to diagnose kids with autism and ADHD and yet they refuse to diagnose kids (or adults) as being sick with the actual bacterial disease of Lyme?

There truly is a conspiracy here in America to deny that Lyme Disease actually exists. Part of that conspiracy was exposed by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, and I will allow his May 1, 2008 press release to speak for itself:

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today announced that his antitrust investigation has uncovered serious flaws in the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s (IDSA) process for writing its 2006 Lyme disease guidelines and the IDSA has agreed to reassess them with the assistance of an outside arbiter.

The IDSA guidelines have sweeping and significant impacts on Lyme disease medical care. They are commonly applied by insurance companies in restricting coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment or other medical care and also strongly influence physician treatment decisions.

Insurance companies have denied coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment relying on these guidelines as justification. The guidelines are also widely cited for conclusions that chronic Lyme disease is nonexistent.

So basically the medical establishment, for whatever reasons, decided to disfavor any diagnosis of “chronic Lyme disease” by claiming that no such disease actually exists. Insurance companies then deny coverage for the only known treatments that actually cure this disease which does not exist. This is actually insane because, as an example, my own expenses fighting what I believe is chronic Lyme disease have been over $5,000 just in the first six months of this year, and I have yet to receive any treatment at all. I’ve been referred from one doctor to another, for tests upon tests, and so far the only actual treatments I’ve received have been for allergy symptoms I’ve had for decades.

But the mystery gets even deeper. In the companion post I discuss the claims by Michael Savage that mental diseases like autism and ADHD are over-diagnosed by the school and medical establishments. This gets to be a really strange saga, and it gets very personal for me.

As I explained in that companion post, my son’s state-run preschool claimed my son had ADHD and kicked him out for “acting out.” My wife and I took our son to a well-known university hospital clinic for ADHD children and my son was carefully evaluated and found to NOT have ADHD.

The story doesn’t end there, however. My son had behavior problems in school and at home. Most of the time, probably even 99% of the time, my son was a really great kid. He was well-behaved and earned good grades in school. But about once every few weeks, there would be some kind of an incident involving a violent outburst. We tried a number of recommended disciplinary techniques, but nothing changed. Instead, things kept getting worse. Last year he had a violent outburst at a doctor’s office and the nurses called the police and had him arrested at age 11. The police put my son into a 72-hour hold in a mental ward and called Child Protective Services. After the 72-hour period was over, my wife went in to pick up my son and was told my son was severely mentally ill and needed long-term treatment. Well, she has a bachelors degree in psychology, so she knows something about mental illness, and she absolutely refused to accept that diagnosis. So, she signed him out “against medical advice” and took him home. After talking to her I told her that since Child Protective Services was now involved, they would be inclined to take our son away if she didn’t immediately do something to get him some other kind of treatment.

Under the gun from Child Protective Services, my wife took my son to a university hospital clinic for children once again. But this time it was a lot further away to get to a place where he could be rationally evaluated by independent-minded doctors. And, once again, it was clear that the original claim by the mental ward run by Child Protective Services was totally off base. Unfortunately, even this university children’s clinic started treating my son for the wrong kind of tic [sic] disorder.

This clinic diagnosed my son as having Tourette Disorder. This was, in fact, not the first time my son had received such a diagnosis, so I’m sure that the clinic was influenced by my son’s medical history. Tourette’s “is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by the presence of multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane.” (Wikipedia) However, my son was really borderline on his diagnosis. The vocal tics weren’t very compelling and the motor tics were virtually non-existent, except for the occasional violent outbursts. Nonetheless, we went along with this diagnosis as preferable to the idea that our son needed to be locked up in a mental ward.

My wife has been getting long-term treatment for Lyme Disease since last fall. While we had some suspicions about my son also having Lyme Disease, it wasn’t until very recently that it was scientifically confirmed (with a Western Blot antibody test) that he did, in fact, have the Lyme Disease infection. What nobody in my family had known until now is that there is a low-but-measurable incidence of people with Lyme Disease who also suffer violent outbursts, as discussed by Dr. Bransfield. It now appears that my son’s “tic disorder” [sic] was really the “tick disorder” of Lyme!

The sick part of this is that we might have discovered this problem a lot earlier if there were some kind of screening test for Lyme that was routinely administered like there is for the AIDS virus. Of course, if Lyme Disease is on the list of diseases that don’t really exist, as claimed by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, then there aren’t going to be any efforts to develop any such screening tests.

And the other sick part of this story is that very few doctors or clinics take the time to carefully evaluate all of the possibilities that might cause a particular patient’s illnesses. The current system under which doctors operate is to give individual patients only a few minutes of time during each appointment. Such brief evaluations are going to cause misdiagnoses far too often for us to tolerate once we realize that these are real people being sent down an absolutely incorrect treatment path with little or no guidance about alternatives or options they ought to be considering.

Something needs to change about how the medical establishment operates here in the USA. This insanity of over-diagnosing “favored” diseases while under-diagnosing “disfavored” diseases has to end. People have the diseases that they have, and doctors need to be better trained as diagnosticians or else they need to get some other doctor who is better trained to handle that part of their job.