So apparently the Romney campaign has decided that the path to the White House includes taking on… Lyme Disease:
Not to be outdone, Gary Johnson wrote hand-written letters to both libertarians in Virginia and promised to take on the stubbed toe epidemic.
r€nato
Wow that’s weird. I didn’t know it was possible for the internet to transmit flop sweat.
PreservedKillick
This is just laughable.
Other microtargeting they may be doing…maybe not so laughable.
beltane
There is speculation that this Lyme disease flyer is in response to the demands made by one particular campaign contributor who believes there is a widespread conspiracy in the medical community to refuse long-term IV antibiotic therapy for people who think they suffer from chronic Lyme disease. http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/09/29/930901/the-dangerous-conspiracy-theory-behind-mitt-romneys-lyme-disease-mailers/
Hill Dweller
ThinkProgress has a pretty good rundown of this story. Apparently it revolves an “influential conservative” in VA, Michael Farris, who claims there is such a thing as “chronic Lyme disease”, which the CDC says doesn’t exist.
ETA: Beltane got there first.
Shalimar
I would jump on the mocking bandwagon, but this is the only thing I have ever seen or heard from Romney that isn’t disgusting in any way. Why shouldn’t we fight Lyme disease?
Gypsy howell
How exactly is Romney doing, or even proposing anything to stop Lyme disease? Are there any undecided voters who are stupid enough to be persuaded by something as obviously panderiffic as this? (and I am a two-time Lyme’s loser, who DID undergo long term IV treatment.)
Stephen Brain
Isn’t this the sort of thing the free market should take care of?
beltane
@Shalimar: How would a President Romney fight Lyme disease? By sending Paul Ryan to VA to slay all the deer there with his mighty bow and arrow?
dmsilev
@Gypsy howell: He will improve synergy. I only wish I were making that up.
oldswede
I thought that Deer Ticks were the vector for Lyme Disease. Now it seems to be Polly Ticks.
beltane
Lyme Disease, pfft. Why can’t Romney promise to eradicate baldness and bad breath?
the Conster
Like Matthew Dowd said on the odious This Week in Talking Points, this campaign focus is something the local city council should be doing. He was all like what the fuck are the Romney people doing with an otherwise good concept such as microtargeting? I think the professionals are just gobsmacked at the incompetence.
raven
@beltane: Nah, just have him stand out there and his suck would vacuum up all the little blood suckers!
AWJ
@Shalimar: This isn’t about fighting disease, this is about pandering to a quack movement as deluded and potentially deadly as the anti-vaccine nuts.
Eric
All of this suggests that the debate zinger may be sonething: if that one cant stop lyme disease in the jungles of northern virginia how will he stop terrorism in the camps in pakistan. I see this going well
beltane
@raven: I wish I had know this earlier because we had a flea infestation in our house earlier this summer. Having Paul Ryan stand in the middle of my living room for a few minutes might have left less of a toxic residue than a flea bomb.
Left Coast Tom
@Shalimar:
Read the thing…he wants to “fight Lyme disease” with “synergy”. As a Californian I’d much rather we fight Sin Nombre Virus (Hantavirus), but I definitely don’t think we need a management consultant offering us synergy.
PaulW
His cure for lyme disease: synergy!
Yes, apparently fighting the disease really needed to combine its efforts between marketing and decision-making!
I swear to God, business people using hep “new” phrases to prove themselves plugged in – promote synergy, LIKE A BOSS! – are really out of the loop.
Here’s what business leaders ought to be talking about: getting it done. taking credit where due, accountability where due. solve this problem and get ready to solve the problems that follow. Give three-point plans with specifics, leave nothing out. And again, get the job done!
beltane
This also tells us that as president Mitt Romney would enact the agenda of anyone who put a few coins in his jockstrap no matter how dangerous and stupid this agenda might be.
Hill Dweller
Read the ThinkProgress link in beltan’s post. This yahoo(Michael Farris) in VA is claiming there is “chronic Lyme disease”, which doesn’t exist, and recommends long term antibiotic use. Farris claims his wife and seven children have “chronic Lyme disease”. They’re being treated by Dr. Joseph Jemsek, who moved his practice to D.C. after losing his license to practice medicine in NC for giving people long term atibiotic treatments.
This sort of lunacy is dangerous. Romney actually met with Farris on his campaign bus.
ckc (not kc)
…I like to get the job done just enough that the job still exists
beltane
At least Rick Perry’s pushing of the HPV vaccine at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry will help to save lives. What Romney is doing here is just obscene; he is not a decent man.
jonas
This is the infectious disease equivalent of Bobby Jindal’s wacky scheme to head off the Deepwater Horizon spill with a series of super sand banks off the Louisiana coast. Besides, why can’t people with Lyme Disease just go to an emergency room?
scav
Is this a campaign or the home shopping channel? How about creating a moment (sure to win over the NASCAR fans) by striding on the debate stage suited out in a racing suit — he could sell the patches on his suit to high-end supporters and they’d be guaranteed he wouldn’t blow the verbal delivery. Of course, at some point, to maximize profits, he’d have to stand with his back to the camera but that’s a small price to pay. Make sure he drags a few babies on to hug (Female demographic) and stick a few micro-targeted bands on their diapers.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Did we really need this mailer to tell us that? I thought it was pretty clear that Romney was happy to outsource his decision making to anyone willing to cross his palm with silver. If this shows anything, it’s just how small the donation has to be to get his attention.
maurinsky
I have a brother-in-law with lesions on his brain due to the unrecognized by the CDC chronic Lyme disease, and he’s had improvements after long-term heavy duty antibiotic use.
MikeJ
As one of the literally hundreds of people who contracted Lyme disease in Virginia, I think this is a stupid thing to base a federal campaign on.
Roger Moore
@scav:
This just shows that you’ve seen pictures of NASCAR drivers but never listened to them. They’re very good at rattling off the names of their sponsors given the slightest provocation. Mitt would only lose the NASCAR demographic* by proving his inability to live up to the standards of the average stock car driver.
*Or lose them worse than he already has. He’s polling behind Obama among NASCAR fans!
trollhattan
I believe the Romney plan is to drag Ann through the brush, tied behind Rafalca, to collect Democrat Lyme ticks. Why else would she be in the picture?
scav
@Roger Moore: Never heard the drivers, have no reason to doubt their verbal skills (They’re just usually busy going very very very fast and not babbling at a camera). I’ve seen the Rombot’s verbal delivery though, I’d insist on a big patch personally. Good to know my cunning cunning plan still won’t win back the NASCAR fans though. I didn’t think the babies would necessarily rope in women either.
different-church-lady
BATLIGHT!
trollhattan
@scav:
While the standard advice for overcoming public speaking stage fright is to imagine your audience naked, for Willard it’s to imagine your audience are all millionaires.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Anecdote time. I’m one of the people with the at-one-time unexplained constellation of symptoms in question. My interest in Lyme disease only extended as far as requesting a test to set my mind at ease. The rheumatologist I eventually saw gave me a laundry list of alternatives, including the eventual solution, a combination of low T3, chronic potassium deficiency, and of all things a vitamin D deficiency.
It would have been very easy for someone less scientifically-inclined than I am to buy into Lyme disease as the cause for what amounts to chronic fatigue syndrome. But I don’t see the difference between “the bacteria is below detection sensitivity but still affecting you” and homeopathic “water memory”.
jonas
@maurinsky: Look, nobody here is saying Lyme Disease isn’t serious or that the government shouldn’t be concerned about it. It’s just supremely ironic that a candidate who otherwise could not give a shit about anyone’s health care — they can all just go to an emergency room, right? — should suddenly develop a severe case of policy awareness about a chronic disease that just happens to be the hobby horse of one of his major donors.
PurpleGirl
Aren’t the NIH and CDC agencies that the Republicans would like to dismantle to save money? Would the Virginia Department of Health (or whatever its name is) be capable of leading a major research project and then implement treatment routines — could they then teach the rest of the states what to do?
scav
@trollhattan: umm, isn’t the smooth-speech sub-routine too close to the arrogant dismissal of rabble sub-routine> They seem to cross-fire. I’d suggest a tiny bubble of time 5 seconds ahead and a biiig mute button, but FAUX seems to have broken the prototype during a test-run.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Hill Dweller:
Gee, that sounds like another syndrome entirely. Munchausen by proxy, anyone?
Todd
Interestingly, the moment anybody says anything remotely critical of the quackery (and inevitable exacerbation of the MRSA problem), posters pop out of the Internet woodwork to whimper. Same thing you get on autism/vax threads.
It’s about as real as fibromyalgia.
Gindy51
@PurpleGirl: I was going to say the same thing. He wants to cut their budgets so how can this help his pal? VA health does not have the biolabs to handle this disease. Only the CDC and USAMRID does. Testing for infectious diseases is done in both places to make sure it is done correctly.
shortstop
Wow, this one’s semi-personal for me. I have family members (the aforecomplainedabout stepmama-in-law, who lives in The Villages in central Florida, and her daughter) who buy fully into the chronic Lyme mini-movement. They’re thoroughly convinced that it’s Obamacare stopping SIL’s grandson from getting long-term high doses of antibiotics. They simply can’t grasp that the medical community says there’s no peer-reviewed research to support this approach, while there’s plenty showing that high doses of antibiotics over long periods can be harmful. No, it has to be Obama “rationing care” and using a “one size fits all approach to healthcare.”
Nothing will move them — not pointing out that medical groups have always worked this way, not noting that without Obamacare, the kid would have been dropped from insurance long ago (his bills are ginormous). It’s gotta be the soshulist black guy’s fault.
trollhattan
@scav:
Heh. What if the Fox mute-a-Willard button actually works 99% of the time? We could be just getting a tip o’ the RomneyBerg.
Have I ever looked forward to debates more then these? Nyet!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Todd: Meh. It basically IS fibromyalgia as my doc (who specializes in fibromyalgia) approaches it: a cluster of real symptoms with no easily identified cause.
Roger Moore
@Gindy51:
You just don’t get it. He’s sure that there is such a thing as Chronic Lyme Disease. CDC and USAMRID is telling him that there isn’t. This is all the proof he needs that CDC and USAMRID are incompetent and deserve to have their funding cut.
Yutsano
@PurpleGirl: Don’t you know there is no such thing as wasting money on good decent white folk? Money is only wasted on those lazy shiftless blahs and no good Messicans and such.
xian
@PaulW: synergy has been a joke since the late ’80s…
Alex S.
I’d like to see a mailer addressing the urgent problem of shrinkage.
Ash Can
@jonas:
A donor who had his medical license yanked in North Carolina for being antibiotic-crazy, and for whose highly questionable methods of treatment Romney wants to remove the legal liability. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
shortstop
@Alex S.: If you weren’t such a lazy, mooching 47 percenter, you could afford a heated pool.
Roger Moore
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
This. The big difference between this an fibromyalgia is that most of the people who believe in fibromyalgia are willing to admit that they have no clue exactly what causes it and they’re stuck treating the symptoms. They’d love it if somebody could show a cause, because then they’d have some prayer of coming up with an effective cure. The people who believe in chronic Lyme disease are sure they know what causes their problems, and they’re not going to accept any argument or evidence to the contrary.
shortstop
Love this from the story:
This word microtargeting — I do not think it means what you think it means.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Shalimar: I’m sure I’m late with the answer, but I won’t let that stop me. We should address Lyme disease in a medically appropriate fashion, as opposed to a course advocated by a home schooling non scientist and an MD who lost one state license based on the championed treatment. I prefer to get science from actual scientists.
Another Halocene Human
@shortstop: Not to mention he didn’t mobilize the base by “avoid[ing] talking about the president’s record.”
Um, it’s like all he talks about to women, glbt, latino audiences.
The pitch to AAs is more subtle: talk about how Michelle’s dad was a public worker. AA households are getting killed by the layoffs in public sector jobs, and the Republicans are obstructing the jobs bills. AAs get this. As a bonus, Obama can still explicitly pitch to selfish white bourgeois about how much the private sector has grown (and public sector shrunk) during his presidency.
Another Halocene Human
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Hear, hear. Take the ninny stuff to HuffPo. Was interested to learn that Arianna has a cult guru on the SHAME Project. Explains much.
Victor
You all notice the Lyme disease bit, but I’m more interested in the blonder, more feminine look of Ryan in that mailer.
Another Halocene Human
@Roger Moore: unexplained pain and muscle weakness is a major field for woo-peddlers because science doesn’t have an explanation or cure (yet). It’s helped along by old school docs being dismissive jerks. Unlike engineers, the profession doesn’t enforce keeping up your credentials well… and you can just go to Big Pharma to stay “up to date” instead of real prof dev.
Sorry to rag on docs, but I lost a lot of respect for MDs when I found out that the professional association of Allergists was pushing non-scientific crap (it was consensus in the 60’s but this was the 1990’s) instead of staying up to date on what the research docs were doing.
Another Halocene Human
@xian: I can’t see “synergy” without hearing StrongBad say it.
“Mul-ti-tasking, uh huh, uh huh, sy-ner-gy.”
dmsilev
@shortstop: One of Art Buchwald’s columns from the Watergate era described Nixon’s enemies as being (long list of small minorities), and “heterosexual constitutionalists”. Same idea.
Roger Moore
@Another Halocene Human:
A huge part of the problem is that modern medicine has advanced mostly by reductionistic approaches to the body. Doctors do their best when treating patients with specific symptoms that can be tied to a single cause that can be solved with a specific course of treatment. The moment medicine gets to anything harder than that, it gets much less successful. Syndromes like fibromyalgia that are systemic and not necessarily caused by one single, simple cause are both frustrating to diagnose and very hard to treat. They probably need a more holistic approach, and that’s something that we’re really bad at doing.
WereBear
Mr WayofCats has Chronic Fatigue, and the only thing that has worked for more than symptom relief has been long term antibiotic therapy; which has recently been recognized as the treatment of choice and is getting more attention and research.
But nuts like this Romney donor will tar the whole thing with their craziness when it should be about science, not paranoid fantasy.
The fact is that we have wildly different levels of understanding and treatment in our medicine. We’re marvelous at reattaching limbs and transplanting corneas and keeping people from dying of cholera and measles.
But anyone with a mysterious and chronic illness discovers that the last thing a doctor wants to do is deal with things they don’t know much about. They are geared towards throwing drugs at you until you are cured; when you are not they get pissy and start claiming you are a mental case.
Elmo
@WereBear:
God, yes. My partner is the toughest bitch this side of the State Department, but has a host of unexplained symptoms including pain, fatigue, gut issues, joint issues, and a mild seizure disorder. Doctors can’t be bothered with trying to figure out what’s wrong – they just want to throw drugs at her in between bouts of the stinkeye. That’s when they’re not obliquely accusing her of drugseeking.
I hate em all.
WaterGirl
@WereBear: @Elmo: A wonderful young woman who used to work for me had this set of symptoms. She went through nearly a year of trying to get doctors to figure out the problem and all they wanted to do was diagnose her with idiopathic something or other, which just meant they had no idea what she had.
She finally prevailed and was sent to the Mayo Clinic where they finally figured it out.
A young man who also worked for me ((maybe 21 years old at the time) had a good friend who had a terrible case of Lyme that was not diagnosed in time, and she is spending her life in a wheelchair with terrible long term effects.
Ditto for the daughter of one of the dean’s in our college.
So I get offended when people want to bash people who are unlucky enough to get this collection of symptoms. They not only have to live with the terrible symptoms and all the tests as they attempt a diagnosis, and yes, some doctors who want to say it’s all in their head.
WereBear
@Elmo: I so feel for her. I’ve spend the last ten years online researching health, and it’s how I’ve gotten Mr WayofCats this far.
Reach me through my website if you wish; and I’ll throw out some ideas which have helped us.
Elmo
@WaterGirl:
So what did the Mayo Clinic figure out? Partner has gone thru diagnoses of:
Fibromyalgia
CFS
Parkinsons
MS
Epilepsy – which isn’t even a diagnosis, but a description of symptoms
Cervical dystonia
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
A thousand times this. The last doc I had before I found my current doc tried to load me up with all sorts of drugs. It’s amazing how many of the “problems” with my blood work cleared up once we had my thyroid numbers back to where they should be.
The US is lagging badly behind Europe in the treatment of many diseases, mine among them.
WaterGirl
@Elmo: As I recall, they considered fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, parkinson’s, MS and a bunch of other things. They ruled out parkinson’s and MS before she went to Mayo. She had multiple tests for Lyme.
I am embarrassed to say that I cannot remember the final details of the diagnosis, but I do recall that Mayo diagnosed her with more than one thing, and she came back with medication that actually helped.
Before she went to mayo, I made her homemade chocolate pudding every week for months because she couldn’t swallow enough to take her pills, so they had to be crushed up in the pudding, which was the only thing strong enough to mask the bitter taste of the pills. But nothing seemed to help. She had terrible joint problems and was very weak, among other things.
After Mayo, the new meds started working, she could swallow again and her symptoms calmed down to the point that she could lead a pretty normal life, though things would flare up now and again.
If it would help, I could contact her and ask for details. Let me know.
Bloix
There’s method in this madness. See
ttp://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/chronic_lyme_disease_delusion_romney_campaign_pushes_medical_nonsense_.html
Emma
I spent a couple of years suffering from extreme exhaustion, fast weight gain, and joint pain. Finally I went to a doctor who actually listened and actually checked. Extensive blood tests showed I was suffering from a massive loss of Vitamin D. I was put on 100,000 (yep, one hundred thousand) units a week. Six weeks later, I was not pain free, but things were definitely manageable. I am still on 3,000 – 4,000 units a day.
The biggest change? My mind isn’t hazy anymore. I don’t have to struggle to reason from point a to point b. It’s wonderful.
BTW, you need to ask them to check specially for some of these things. They don’t show up on the regular blood tests, or they show up as “normal range.”
xian
@maurinsky: how do you know the cause if it’s unrecognized?
WereBear
@Emma: And “normal” can be woefully off.
Such as Vitamin D, where 30 used to be considered normal. Now they are coming to understand it is merely “average” on a population that is chronically deficient.
Emma
@WereBear: Yeah, that was a hell of a surprise. I still giggle when I remember how they told me I needed to start taking the vitamin: get to your pharmacy now and start tonight. Your vitamin D is so low you could actually die. And supposedly I was “low-normal” range.
MazeDancer
Chronic Lyme is rampant in the North East.
And that includes New Hampshire.
There will be plenty of people in NH, who if they hear about this, will think, gee, finally, someone’s listening.
And all this mocking and belittling of Mitt – who no question is deservedly mockable about almost everything else – is exactly the attitude anyone suffering from any of the modern mystery diseases gets FROM THEIR DOCTORS.
There is not always a bulls eye rash with Lyme. It is not always caught or treated. And if it is caught early, does the Lyme spirochete persist and maintain disease after an initial two weeks of doxycycline? Your insurance company says no, but your symptoms say yes.
It is well established that infections can trigger auto-immune conditions. So maybe Lyme brings on other lifetime conditions and the spirochete still being around is incidental. As they say in scientific research, this is not currently known.
What is known is there is a lot of suffering. As noted in this thread. Chronic Lyme, Chronic Fatigue, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Environmental Reactions, Name Your Auto Immune Condition – and laughing and scorning and saying it’s all in your head is pretty much the standard treatment. And, astonishingly, Mitt Romney, of all people, is reacting differently.
Every insurance company is fighting Chronic Lyme tooth and nail because so many people in the North East, especially, have been affected.
Anyone who got beat up and laughed at about Chronic Fatigue decades ago, before it was recognized as “real” – still no known cause or cure – knows that Western Medicine is fantastic about Orthopedic Surgery, Heart Attack, Emergency Room Care, structural stuff. But long-term, chronic conditions with no known cause that one Pharma product can’t cure, not so much.
No one at Balloon Juice intends to mock suffering people. But not understanding the degree of suffering happening, especially in the NE, can make you, unaware, seem part of the mocking they experience daily.
SJ
Love how blithely people dismiss chronic Lyme. I have it. I had an acute infection in 1995. I began experiencing strange & debilitating neurological symptoms in 1998. It was not until 2005 that I finally found a doctor who diagnosed it as Chronic Lyme. There is no reliable test for the chronic infection & there perhaps dozens of co-infections & symptoms vary across the population. It is not yet possible to reliably diagnose this suite of symptoms & attribute them to a definitive cause. But the disease is real.
There are very sound economic reasons that the insurance industry pressured the medical community/CDC/NIH to deny the existence of the disease. I don’t like them but I recognize that our current medical model is about shareholder return, not healing the sick. If big Pharma found a real or even plausible cure you can bet we would suddenly see over diagnosis of Lyme like we do with mood disorders currently.
I also have Hepatitis C and have had since 1983. I was told by doctors for nearly 20 years that I was perfectly healthy. If I didn’t feel well I was probably depressed & should take Prozac. It wasn’t until 2000 that they isolated the virus & developed a test for it. Studies of blood samples from World War II soldiers show that the virus has been in the population for 70 years at least. The disease did not spring into existence only after they perfected the lab test. The same phenomenon as early geneticists labeling most of our DNA as “junk” because they did not know what it did.
I don’t blame Western doctors for being consistent in their approach. It certainly better than capriciously deciding that my troubles are caused by malevolent garden gnomes. But the medical industry is not omniscient and can frequently be arrogantly wrong.
None of this inclines me to vote for Mitt. This stunt makes me despise him even more. Micro-pandering to a population whose suffering is quite real. When the truth is RMoney would process those people into fertilizer if there was a buck in it for him.
Joel
@maurinsky: why would you need long term antibiotics? Either they work and kill the bacteria immediately or they don’t work and you are killing other bacteria in your body in a treatment that does more harm than good.
Another Halocene Human
@Roger Moore: See, I am still unconvinced by this argument. I think it’s more that when you get to the human body, the amount we know is still dwarfed by what we don’t know. You wouldn’t ask Galileo to elucidate a point of quantum mechanics.
Non-specific lifestyle interventions probably help more than we know, but doctors are a class aren’t equipped to do much on their own about America’s Gini coefficient.
Another Halocene Human
@SJ: It’s probably not a chronic infection, though. It’s probably a long-standing derangement of your inflammation factors following a serious infection. This happens with norovirus, mono, and other serious infections as well.
Antibiotics may turn out to have other side effects that lead to symptom relief. This has turned out to be the case with interventions before.
Another Halocene Human
@MazeDancer: It is well established that infections can trigger auto-immune conditions. So maybe Lyme brings on other lifetime conditions and the spirochete still being around is incidental. As they say in scientific research, this is not currently known.
Yes, this is quite possible. There are always many people suffering. Some will be diagnosed with “chronic lyme” by unscrupulous practicioners who are trying to make a fast buck off a suffering person.
I love all the special pleading, “maybe they didn’t know they had Lyme.” My sister was infected with Lyme–you damn well know. Oh, and she doesn’t have “chronic lyme”. But plenty of people who suffered from either a) massive injuries or b) severe infections DO end up with persistent auto-immune disorders.
Blame the doctors for dismissing patients out of hand, but let’s not turn around and pull a fallacy of the divided middle and trust and praise charlatans.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@MazeDancer: Actually, what I see people mocking is the specific treatment, not the disease/disorder itself. Antibiotics need to be prescribed with care, which is *not* being done by this set of quacks.
Perhaps you missed how many of us have recounted having the same problems? For me, it was over *ten years* of fighting the idiot part of the medical establishment before I found my current doc and moved up her waiting list to actually get to see her.
Bluntly, if there are no harmful bacteria present, any benefit gained from antibiotics is from a side effect of the medicine. I’ve seen it suggested that the people who benefit from long-term antibiotics may actually be responding to the anti-inflammatory effects some have. That seems to me to be research worth pursuing.
My doc is increasingly leaning toward lifestyle being a major component of the underlying causes. Nutrient deficiencies can cause a variety of effects, and the usual American diet should be in the dictionary under malnutrition. She’s had substantial success across her fibromyalgia practice with this approach.
It occurs to me that this is related to another bit of the right-wing psychology that we’ve discussed occasionally here, that the wingers don’t usually cope well with uncertainty. Quack diagnoses provide certainty in situations where even the specialists admit we don’t understand the causes yet.
SJ
@Another Halocene Human:
Thx… but I can’t take antibiotics because of the liver stress they cause. Actually doing pretty well with diet & herbs that treat the more egregious symptoms.
MazeDancer
@Another Halocene Human:
Every body is different.
That is a reality. That isn’t so helpful in prescribing blockbuster drugs for mystery illnesses.
I agree with you about long term antibiotics. Risky stuff. Though some swear they’ve been helped. Having had all the antibiotics legally possible because of surgery at a dirty hospital – a world famous one – and that other deer tick disease Ehrlichiosis, wouldn’t wish that therapy on anyone.
As you no doubt know, everyone helping people Western Medicine have abandoned is not a charlatan.
Mitt certainly is.
And his”special pleading” and using people’s suffering is repulsive. But the suffering is real. And neither the big, mainstream help – nor the insurance to pay for anything – is there.
Mitt is big and mainstream. He’s paying attention. And NH is key to his victory.
MazeDancer
Sorry, to seemingly thread hog. But seeing two people I so greatly admire – Rachel Maddow, who lives in Northampton, MA, and should know better, and now John Cole, who compares Chronic Lyme to toe stubbing – end up making light of real suffering with tick jokes was igniting.
Here is a very recent presentation by a visiting Rheumatologist at a Lupus workshop at the nation’s leading musculoskeletal hospital, Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC, on what can trigger auto immune conditions. Just a decade ago, this list would have been “too woo-woo” for the mainstream:
http://goo.gl/wrt26
And @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Your doc sounds more informed than most. And, absolutely, diet is key to healing all mystery disease heath challenges. So is physical stuff like bodywork, moving your body, any form of movement therapy. Five Elements Acupuncture can be miraculous. Also doing the hard work to increase happiness in your being. Really hard work. Ancient stress kills.
It is amusing to see the mainstreaming of “no wheat, no sugar” a looooonnnnnnng standing prescription on the frontlines of mystery disease fighting. But anything that helps people is good.
gelfling545
@beltane:
Maybe not, though.
Double Nickel
Why is Rmoney taking advice from Catbert?
Bob h
Lyme is presumably a big worry for upper class women who are exposed while out in their gardens.
WereBear
In the case of C. Pneumoniae, this is a bug with a complicated life cycle, and a lot of the time it is in a form which hides inside of the body’s cells. So the long term antibiotics, which are carefully “pulsed” and used in conjunction with amino acid and neurochemical supplements, have to hang around for a while to reach the bug at a vulnerable stage of its development.
Anyone with a chronic health condition with an auto-immune component should explore the CPNHelp.org website. I fired my husband’s old doctor and the papers on this site convinced our then-new doctor to monitor his treatment and go along with my recommendations.
Oh, are we supposed to take him to some specialist somewhere? Thanks, but there aren’t very many, and they are all far away, and he can’t travel.
Another Halocene Human
@MazeDancer: Since the wheat thing seems to be triggered by antibiotic use, it’s no surprise that people in that community pegged onto it first.
And the sugar thing is nothing new. Just saw a graph showing how foods tracked with inflation, and soda pop has gotten significantly cheaper vis a vis inflation over time. Unfortunately, price is a powerful motivator.
Another Halocene Human
Diet’s important, but it can also be overblown. There are some real horror stories on Quackwatch, if you’re brave enough to, well, brave them. For one thing there is no perfect diet or perfect food and humans have never been healthier than now. Our mortality cannot be exorcised.
The Other Chuck
@Another Halocene Human:
I know a few MDs, not a lot, but they all put allergists below chiropractors on the respect scale, since at least a decent chiropractor can do competent “osteo manip” work.
The Other Chuck
@Another Halocene Human:
Never healthier until recently. The whole spectrum of diseases related to obesity has us slipping backward.
oldswede
When Mittz was Governor of Massachusetts, Lyme disease was becoming a major public health problem (see this article and scroll down to chart for years: Lyme Disease in Massachusetts: A Public Health Crisis). He was governor until January 4, 2007.
Funny that it didn’t become an issue for him until a major donor in Virginia caught it.
oldswede
Xenos
Someone I know well was treated successfully for Lyme (not chronic) this summer. Saw the ring-shaped inflammation, went on three weeks’ Doxycyclene (sp?), and it cleared up the symptoms.
But, if there had been no rash, and this had happened a year ago, the Lyme disease symptoms would have been lumped in with chronic and yet-untreated problems from her rapidly declining thyroid, severe vitamin-d deficiency, glaucoma (caused migraines for 20 years), food sensitivities, and a set of side-effects brought about by hormonal treatments.
Middle age can bring several chronic health issues to head simultaneously. The medical business often does a poor job of sorting out the several things that can be going on. The attraction of simplistic explanations and quack remedies can be quite powerful in this sort of situation.
BobS
Looks like Romney is subcontracting to The Onion for his campaign literature.
It’s been my experience that the patients who include chronic Lyme Disease (as well as fibromyalgia) as a part of their medical history are frequently some of the more neurotic people I see.
Chicken or egg?
redshirt
I have two words: Morgan Fairchild
Bob2
I can’t wait for Romney to hit Obama with the Lyme Disease question in the debates. Total game changer when people discover Obama does not care about Lyme disease.
Bob2
This is only more evidence that Romney only cares about the 1%.
shortstop
@Xenos: Yes about multiple symptoms of middle age making it harder to untangle the threads. Interestingly, the family member I mentioned above is a young man. Some of the symptoms his mother and grandmother attribute to chronic Lyme are consistent with a personality disorder that can initially emerge in boys that age. His mom and grandma don’t want to go there.
The Lodger
Anyone else notice how faded the blonde woman is in that picture? I can’t even tell if that’s Ann or not.