Lyme is a progressive disease caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi found in ticks that causes an enormous build-up of harmful toxins. [In Europe and Asia, the causative Lyme bacterium are Borellia Afzelli and Borellia Garinii.] The CDC (Center for Disease Control), lists several tickborne diseases and the microbes that cause them.
I highly recommend you watch the documentary entitled “Under Our Skin” about Lyme disease. It does an excellent job exposing the conflict of interests that have resulted in the great Lyme disease controversy or war that continues even as Lyme is becoming a mega-epidemic across much of the world. The number of extremely chronically sick and suffering people is in the millions and climbing exponentially every year. Pay particular attention to the second half of the movie where the “follow the money” trail is uncovered.
If you google each of the Lyme-literate physicians in the movie treating people long-term for lingering suffering, you’ll learn that the IDSA guidelines in the hands of insurance companies’ personnel sending anonymous e-mails to medical boards, and state officials are being used as a hammer to censure caring physicians who dared to treat chronically sick people due Lyme. The people who formulated the Lyme treatment protocols had financial conflict of interests. Medical boards in various states are actively destroying key Lyme-literate doctors in order to create an atmosphere of fear in the whole medical community. Doctors are afraid to treat or continue to treat as long as the patients needed to finally recover some quality of their lives, for fear they will lose their medical licenses. The IDSA guidelines say 28 days of antibiotics and no more with a couple of exceptions where one 30-day additional round of antibiotics can be given to some patients only.
Lyme is the only infectious disease I’ve heard of where such a stringent, short protocol for the use of antibiotics has been mandated. Lyme is caused by a corkscrew bacterium called a spirochete that can invade any tissue in the body of a human. Syphilis is caused by a corkscrew bacterium that can attack any tissues in the body, according to pathologists, and it is treated with antibiotics as long as necessary to control the disease progression. Many other infectious diseases caused by bacteria are also treated by long-term antibiotic protocols, but suddenly along comes Lyme, an infectious disease, and it’s claimed to be miraculously cured in just 14 to 28 days of antibiotics. If this was universally held to be true and supported by the patients’ recoveries, that would be logical, however, neither of those is the case.
There is so much content in Under Our Skin that I watched it several times over the last couple of years. This last most recent viewing, I suddenly really understood the seriousness of the spreading of Lyme and the horrendous consequences on a new level. None of us can afford to ever be careless again where exposure to ticks is concerned for our children, ourselves, and our pets.
When I was young, we thought nothing of picking ticks off our dogs or ourselves with our bare hands and fortunately, there were never any adverse consequences to us, but that will not ever be the case again.
So why is it so difficult to diagnose Lyme disease, contrary to the opinions of the IDSA and most of the medical establishment? Like everything surrounding Lyme, it’s complicated. The actual biological complexity is confounded by the politics, or controversies attached to the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme and other co-infectious agents which may be contracted by a borrelia burgdorferi carrying tick bite.
If you can even find a doctor who will test you for Lyme at any point in time after a tick bite, the “standard” Lyme tests are Elisa (touted as very sensitive because it will read positive for various other infectious agents) and Western Blot test, which is often used to confirm a positive for Lyme result on the Elisa. Even though results come back as positive, the CDC guidelines states that you must have multiple serum (blood) marker positives in order to be officially diagnosed (“Two-step” par 2). These two tests only find 50% of cases of those who suffer from Lyme (Wilson 31 :52-32:00). Part of the reason for this is the timing of the test. The longer someone has Lyme disease, the harder it is to diagnose it because the bacteria progressively forms biofilms in which the borrelia bacteria are camouflaged (hidden). On the other hand if you get tested withing the first 4 to 6 weeks or less after a tick bite, your body likely will not have yet formed any antibodies to the borrelia burgdorferi bacterium, and you’ll be stuck with a false negative (negative meaning no Lyme detected). Good luck ever getting retested if that happens.
In other words, say you have a tick bite, but you are one of the 20% or more of people who don’t get the telltale red circular bullseye rash, and you get tested at 1 week to 5 weeks after the bite and the test comes up negative, you’ll find it difficult to impossible to convince the doctor to test you again at just over 6 weeks. Furthermore, your insurance won’t likely pay for a second set of tests.
So, what about the people who have suffered and searched for years for effective diagnosis and treatment for Lyme disease. Good luck is all we can say about that! (Try researching for doctors in New York state since it has a high rate of Lyme.) According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), Connecticut has the highest rate of Lyme in this nation.
You should know that a committee of 14 men, 9 of whom had a conflict of interest are responsible for the IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America) treatment “guidelines” which carries the weight of law in some states, and perhaps in all, practically speaking. Of the research they reviewed to formulate their “guidelines,” much was their own writing or that of colleagues in the institutions in which they work. In plain language, they stacked the deck entirely in a way that has been used to persecute and prosecute physicians trying to help people suffering with post-treatment Lyme maladies and cases of Lyme that were not diagnosed for many months to years. The various committee members agenda was influenced by their business dealings with insurance corporations who didn’t want to lose profits by paying for patients’ long-term antibiotic treatments and other potential profits from research they worked on. So, the committee said 14 to 28 days of antibiotics is all it’s ever going to take to rid a patient of the Lyme infectious bacteria.
It is well-known that the tests to detect Lyme that have been approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), are less than optimal. In other words, you could in fact have Lyme, but the tests come back negative in part, thus disqualifying your case as one of Lyme. Getting correctly diagnosed is dependent on the biases of the doctor you’re seeing and the timing of the blood draws for the lab tests. Get tested prior to 6 weeks post bite, (all the while the bacteria is multiplying and invading more of your tissues and organs) and your body may not have yet made antibodies that the tests can read. Get the medical runaround for over 2 years with no diagnosis and no Lyme tests having been run as happened to my friend Susan Mytko, and the bacteria may not be detected in the serology tests approved by the FDA. The bacteria can apparently hide in fatty tissues and elsewhere in the body and cloak itself by forming biofilms so that it won’t be found using the FDA approved tests. No other tests to date have been approved, of which I’m aware.
The bottom line is that Lyme disease become politicized when the spirochete that causes it was discovered in 1981 because of money. Researchers, scientists and others working, often on taxpayer funded projects, stand to benefit financially either personally or within their institutions. That’s because the federal government passed a law in 1980 that both government institutions and universities’ research departments could patent living organisms or even parts of living organisms. When that happened, scientists and researchers suddenly had a way to take what they learned in the lab into the marketplace and make money. That’s why and when they stopped working for the good of the public and now had conflict of interests motives due to potential wealth creation.
Scientists could, as of 1980, take what they learned in lab research, or clinical research and start a company to develop tests for various the microorganisms that cause disease, among other ways to monetize their research results.
The health insurance industry realized that as a result of the new law, they might be able to approach researchers in universities, etc., to influence them to provide disease and treatment protocols descriptions that would limit the type and length of treatments, tests, that should be administered in treating suffering people.
According to investigative sources, 4 of the 14-man IDSA committee that established the Lyme and other tickborne treatment guidelines were involved financially with insurance companies. The insurance companies got what they wanted, a way to limit their risks and hold on to profits by denying treatments to sick people, not just with Lyme, as in this case, but across the board. One such example is chronic fatigue syndrome, which the mainstream medical establishment, i.e., the medical industrial oligarchy, says does not exist, to the greedy delight of the health insurance underwriters of America and the government of Great Britain. Because of that “belief” patients presenting with complaints that in an uncorrupted medical system would receive care for their physical suffering are sent to psychiatric physicians and told their symptoms, exhaustion, cognitive problems like brain-fog are not real and are psychosomatic (imagined in a deluded mind). As Rodney Dangerfield would have said, they get no respect.
The above described influence of the insurance industries functionaries results in the bankrupting of many long-term Lyme sufferers. In the movie, Under Our Skin several such people told how they had spent out of their own pockets $75,000 to well over $100,000 trying to get the help they needed to survive and in some few instances get their lives back because insurance wouldn’t pay for their treatments. That’s real people, and families being financially devastated. People don’t do that to themselves just imagining they’re ill. Such ridiculous and thoughtless accusations are cruel given the severity of suffering and indeed of both adults and children dying from inadequately treated or misdiagnosed Lyme disease and its complications.
Doctors who are totally part of the mainstream medical establishment keep saying in conferences and documentaries I’ve seen on You Tube that it’s unlikely to exceedingly rare that anyone dies from inadequately treated Lyme, but that’s not true as you will see in the video I’ve recommended. Even a member of the CDC, Ben Beard, Chief of the Bacterial Diseases Branch of the CDC 6 or more years ago said on camera that there have been deaths due to Lyme.
Much more could be said along these lines, but suffice it to say, the madness falls squarely on the medical establishment for asserting that all the hundreds of thousands, perhaps in this country alone over 900,000 people, suffering with long years of life-threatening, debilitating illness and intolerable pain after they received their paltry 28 days of antibiotics, are all only imagining that they are sick. Such a ridiculous and cruel accusation can only be described as delusions in the “sick” minds of blinded physicians, lackies to the medical industrial oligarchy that is swallowing up whole nations’ medical systems, funded by the transnational pharmaceutical/chemical industry.
Big Pharma with their unimaginable trillions of dollars greed-based profits can and does buy, influence, and manipulate the entirety of governmental agencies and congress at will to serve their profit agenda. Don’t believe that last statemen? Start researching, and eventually you’ll begin to understand the “big picture” as many seemingly unrelated institutions, universities, and governmental agencies like a complex puzzle with many pieces begin to form a clear picture.
It is also a reality that the pharmaceutical industry is profiting mightily at the expense of many Lyme sufferers who have been misdiagnosed, sometimes by multiple doctors and specialists over the span of years and given prescriptions for drugs that could never benefit a Lyme sufferer. These drugs have great long lists of potentially damaging side-effects and indeed some can cause diseases, such as heart disease, which the patient never had before. Ironically, numbers of drugs can also cause permanent neurological damage, and I said it’s ironic because one of the very common and most difficult to live with complications of improperly treated Lyme is neurological damage caused by the thriving colonies of spirochete bacteria and other co-infectious microbes from tick bite. All such drugs given to Lyme positive patients are negligent medical practices and can develop physician-caused illnesses. No medical boards and insurance companies or state authorities are coming after the many doctors misdiagnosing Lyme sufferers with MS, ALS, lupus, syphilis, fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s disease, censuring them, and threatening to take away their medical licenses for writing prescriptions for many harmful drugs. Yet, the IDSA uses as its primary excuse for setting guidelines for very short times of administering antibiotics to Lyme patients the rationale that long-term administration of antimicrobial medications (antibiotics) is dangerous and could be harmful to Lyme patients. I’m sure the frozen hearts of the blackguards of the board of the IDSA are truly moved with concern for the hundreds of thousands of Lyme patients who go on suffering and dying year after year.
The people of the United States and increasingly many other nations, no longer have a government that functions for the good of their populations. They are puppets on strings pulled by the lords of the pharmaceutical, chemical, and agribusiness world-wide oligarchy. In these not-so-United States of America, we now have Government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations, and no longer have any governmental departments concerned for the genuine health of this nation’s people. Big business has its own former executives, scientists, etc. in the decision and policy making positions in every agency of the federal government originally formed to provide for the public weal (prosperity and happiness).
One last note on this type of conflict of interest. The congress of this nation does not oversee the FDA. The FDA makes up its own rules. The so-called science and trials of the drugs to be approved or rejected for physicians to prescribe are provided by the pharmaceutical industry that developed those drugs. Interestingly, the industry trials of newly developed drugs invariably come up favoring the efficacy and safety of those drugs, whereas, when trials are run on those same drugs by independent researchers around the world (who haven’t received grants or monies from the pharmaceutical industry), the drugs often prove to not be safe or beneficial to treat the conditions for which they were ostensibly developed.
According to Lyme-literate doctors, the diagnosis of Lyme is a clinical diagnostic process and cannot be accurately determined from the “standardized FDA approved serum tests in many cases, and especially in patients who have had undiagnosed Lyme for many months to several years. The same applies to people who lose their immunity to Lyme after successful antibiotic treatment as their anti-bodies against Lyme diminish over time and who then get bitten by a Lyme carrying tick again. Dr. Richard Jacobs is of the opinion that people don’t usually get reinfected, but given the research results that more than 60% of the Ixodes scapularis, commonly called deer ticks (hard bodies and black legs), are carrying Lyme causing Borellia Burgdorferi, such an assertion is baseless.
Possibly a Lyme-literate doctor might order the CD57 test that looks at levels of a specific white blood cell. Having extremely low levels of CD 57 is a fairly usual symptom of those with chronic Lyme disease.
Remember the medical establishment doesn’t really believe there is any such condition as chronic Lyme disease. To them, you have an acute case of Lyme, receive the short round of antibiotics and you’re cured. Problem is, they’re wrong, but will not admit the possibility they could be wrong because of government policies in place in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the insurance industry, etc. Lyme disease has become politicized in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and recently, Germany. The medical industrial complex has spread its tentacles.
The medical establishment’s “belief” that there is no such thing as chronic Lyme disease should become a moot point in the light of research done at John Hopkins. They examined 12 patients with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome using a very advanced type of brain scan which showed their brains had widespread brain inflammation. Unfortunately, that small study will never get translated into medical handling of Lyme patients and even if it did become known, local hospitals likely won’t have the necessary scanning equipment and insurance companies likely won’t ever pay for it. The commonly used PET, and MRI’s have not shown brain inflammation in Lyme sufferers.
References from published research papers: (footnotes cite sources)
“Lyme allows a horrid release of toxins in the body. The release of toxins causes an inflammatory response (Herxheimer reaction), which can onset a chain reaction of vasodilation, low blood pressure, hypoxia, which can, in extreme cases, cause organ failure (“Endotoxins” par 10). Therefore, these toxins are the cause of many of the debilitating neurological, muscular, and major organ problems which are toxins released only after bacteria dies, it is more challenging to identify which bacteria releases which toxin. Because the toxins released by the bacteria are endotoxins (known as Lipid A), For example, one of the bacteria that are fairly common for those suffering with Lyme is that of spirochete. The spirochete bacterium, known for its ability to spiral its way through any tissue, has an outer covering that protects the toxins until the bacteria dies and releases the toxin.”
The research articles referenced in the some of the content of Editorial #2 on Lyme, explaining the difficulties in diagnosing Lyme disease and some information on types of lab tests was done by a school age member of our Saving Susan Heroes. Org team. We thought her work was excellent and it was derived from published scientific papers and other sources here footnoted.
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“Endotoxins: The Reason The Herxheimer Reaction Exists.” Tired of Lyme. Weebly, n.d. Web
“Everything You Wanted to Know About CD57.” Researched Nutritionals,
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Mayer, Alex. “TOUCHED BY LYME: What Does the CDC’s 300,000 Number Really Mean?” LymeDisease.org,
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Wilson, Andy Abrahams, director. Under Our Skin. Warner Bros.,
www.amazon.comidpIB004118DFG/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1.