To begin with I want to stress the fact that there are quite a few legitmate studies to show that Lyme disease can become a chronic and relapsing illness. Here are some of these studies http://www.lymeinfo.net/lymefiles.html
A couple of days ago the Hartford Courant published an article about Lyme disease entitled Yale Study Suggests Cause of Lyme-Related Arthritis http://www.ctnow.com/health/connecticut/hc-lyme-disease-yale-0626-20120625,0,6218943.story
The main point being made by this Yale study is that Lyme arthritis is caused by dead spirochete proteins and not from active infection. This may be true in some cases. We don't really know enough to completely toss out this hypothesis. There are some chronic sufferers that don't appear to be helped by antibiotics. However.........
Lyme literate doctors who use long term antibiotics with their patients....when needed......do this because they see improvement and often remission of symptoms. I am not aware of any Lyme doctors.... who treat chonic Lyme disease symptoms..... who would continually treat chronic Lyme arthritis or chronic neurological Lyme disease with antibiotics, if there was no improvement. Sometimes it takes a few months of treatment to see ANY improvement. I know this to be true from personal experience.This happens most often when a patient has been undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a period of time .....this is when the infection can become much more difficult to erradicate.
Personally, I believe there is more than one factor contributing to Chronic Lyme symptoms but we should NEVER RULE OUT chronic , relapsing infection. Studies, doctor's clinical observations, and patients' experiences all testify to the REALITY that the Lyme disease pathogen changes form, creates biofilms and does this to sequester and protect themselves from testing, our immune systems and even from antibiotics.
So....the debate rages on....perhaps in some cases due to conflicts of interest and profits of drug companies and major charities or organizations, such as the Arthritis Foundation. I feel that we do not need to say there is never an autoimmune component to Chronic Lyme Arthritis nor should anyone be saying that there is no such thing as chronic relapsing Lyme disease. Thousands upon thousands of sufferers are being prevented from getting treatment which addresses the cause instead of only the symptoms. We often hear warnings from the anti-chronic lyme infection crowd...that using long term antibioitcs will create resistant bacteria. I seem to have very strong memories of doctors warning that we need to take long enough courses of antibiotics to make sure most germs are eliminated. Doing this is supposed to prevent antibiotic resistant bacteria. One of the newer recommendations by the anti- chronic infection group (Yale, IDSA, Etc) is that when someone is bitten, one pill of doxycycline is supposed to prevent or arrest all infection. This has never been true for any disease, never mind a stealth pathogen such as Lyme disease. How does this recommendation affect testing results?
Almost all television and newspaper reports state that there is no such thing as chronic infection with Lyme disease. Nowhere do I see studies to support this theory. On the other hand we have many studies to support the reality that Lyme can be and often is a chonic infection. Activisits, including myself, have shown these studies to the media...over and over again. Why are these studies not being presented. A healthy debate is supposed to show evidence from both sides. A few years ago we had a Lyme protest at The University of Connecticut. Fox News and The Hartford Courant were present. Several people spent quite a bit of time explaining and showing the media studies......actual evidence of chronic Lyme infection. They seemed receptive. We anxiously awaited the news that evening. I was shocked to see what Fox news presented. They aired a segment showing Dr. Feder from UCONN saying that there is NO EVIDENCE of Chronic Lyme disease (active infection). Then when they showed bits of interviews with the protesting patients and activisits....there was absolutely NO MENTION of ANY of the evidence we presented which would prove Dr. Feder wrong. Who owns the newspaper and television media? Corporations do. How intertwined is the drug industry with the media? Just remember....scads more profits are made on drugs when the cause of disease is allowed to progress unchecked and then labeled as autoimmune. The number of symptoms begins to increase exponentially when the cause is left untreated. And......of course the drug companies have a different drug for every symptom. Hmmmmm
To sum this up.....I am not debating that some autoimmunity may or may not be involved in arthritis. I am sharing the idea that is it almost impossible at this point to be able to state with such certainty (as Yale and the IDSA are doing) that there is no such thing as relapsing or chronic infection in Lyme. Long term antibiotics must first be tried with intractable cases and then if they do not work....then you depend only on the symptomatic treatments. Long term antibiotics work in many people and don't forget the studies which show Lyme can be a chronic infection despite IDSA recommended treatment courses.
The following post is from Jerry Leonard in response to the Hartford Courant article at the link above.
Jerry Leonard · · Charlotte, North Carolina
A couple of days ago the Hartford Courant published an article about Lyme disease entitled Yale Study Suggests Cause of Lyme-Related Arthritis http://www.ctnow.com/health/connecticut/hc-lyme-disease-yale-0626-20120625,0,6218943.story
The main point being made by this Yale study is that Lyme arthritis is caused by dead spirochete proteins and not from active infection. This may be true in some cases. We don't really know enough to completely toss out this hypothesis. There are some chronic sufferers that don't appear to be helped by antibiotics. However.........
Lyme literate doctors who use long term antibiotics with their patients....when needed......do this because they see improvement and often remission of symptoms. I am not aware of any Lyme doctors.... who treat chonic Lyme disease symptoms..... who would continually treat chronic Lyme arthritis or chronic neurological Lyme disease with antibiotics, if there was no improvement. Sometimes it takes a few months of treatment to see ANY improvement. I know this to be true from personal experience.This happens most often when a patient has been undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a period of time .....this is when the infection can become much more difficult to erradicate.
Personally, I believe there is more than one factor contributing to Chronic Lyme symptoms but we should NEVER RULE OUT chronic , relapsing infection. Studies, doctor's clinical observations, and patients' experiences all testify to the REALITY that the Lyme disease pathogen changes form, creates biofilms and does this to sequester and protect themselves from testing, our immune systems and even from antibiotics.
So....the debate rages on....perhaps in some cases due to conflicts of interest and profits of drug companies and major charities or organizations, such as the Arthritis Foundation. I feel that we do not need to say there is never an autoimmune component to Chronic Lyme Arthritis nor should anyone be saying that there is no such thing as chronic relapsing Lyme disease. Thousands upon thousands of sufferers are being prevented from getting treatment which addresses the cause instead of only the symptoms. We often hear warnings from the anti-chronic lyme infection crowd...that using long term antibioitcs will create resistant bacteria. I seem to have very strong memories of doctors warning that we need to take long enough courses of antibiotics to make sure most germs are eliminated. Doing this is supposed to prevent antibiotic resistant bacteria. One of the newer recommendations by the anti- chronic infection group (Yale, IDSA, Etc) is that when someone is bitten, one pill of doxycycline is supposed to prevent or arrest all infection. This has never been true for any disease, never mind a stealth pathogen such as Lyme disease. How does this recommendation affect testing results?
Almost all television and newspaper reports state that there is no such thing as chronic infection with Lyme disease. Nowhere do I see studies to support this theory. On the other hand we have many studies to support the reality that Lyme can be and often is a chonic infection. Activisits, including myself, have shown these studies to the media...over and over again. Why are these studies not being presented. A healthy debate is supposed to show evidence from both sides. A few years ago we had a Lyme protest at The University of Connecticut. Fox News and The Hartford Courant were present. Several people spent quite a bit of time explaining and showing the media studies......actual evidence of chronic Lyme infection. They seemed receptive. We anxiously awaited the news that evening. I was shocked to see what Fox news presented. They aired a segment showing Dr. Feder from UCONN saying that there is NO EVIDENCE of Chronic Lyme disease (active infection). Then when they showed bits of interviews with the protesting patients and activisits....there was absolutely NO MENTION of ANY of the evidence we presented which would prove Dr. Feder wrong. Who owns the newspaper and television media? Corporations do. How intertwined is the drug industry with the media? Just remember....scads more profits are made on drugs when the cause of disease is allowed to progress unchecked and then labeled as autoimmune. The number of symptoms begins to increase exponentially when the cause is left untreated. And......of course the drug companies have a different drug for every symptom. Hmmmmm
To sum this up.....I am not debating that some autoimmunity may or may not be involved in arthritis. I am sharing the idea that is it almost impossible at this point to be able to state with such certainty (as Yale and the IDSA are doing) that there is no such thing as relapsing or chronic infection in Lyme. Long term antibiotics must first be tried with intractable cases and then if they do not work....then you depend only on the symptomatic treatments. Long term antibiotics work in many people and don't forget the studies which show Lyme can be a chronic infection despite IDSA recommended treatment courses.
The following post is from Jerry Leonard in response to the Hartford Courant article at the link above.
Jerry Leonard · · Charlotte, North Carolina
More
nonsense from the Lyme "experts" at Yale... they've gone from a non-existent
virus, to a non-existent tick species to a non-existent auto-immune mechanism...
anything to deny patients long-term antibiotics against an active pleomorphic
stealth infection and market their vaccine by creating a synthetic epidemic
through the biowarfare infrastructure (http://www.youtube.com/
The establishment 'expert' on Lyme disease is Allen Steere (formerly of Yale). Gary Wormser's IDSA treatment denial guidelines merely institutionalized Steere's deliberately erroneous positions over the years:
Steere initially claimed Lyme was cause by a virus.
wrong! there is no such virus.
Steere claimed Lyme was spread by Ixodes dammini ticks.
wrong! there is no such tick species.
Steere and his Yale group initially claimed an...tibiotics did nothing for Lyme disease.
wrong! doctors all around him were having success treating Lyme with antibiotics (too bad for Steere's Tuskegee patients)--Steere ridiculed these doctors and helped put them out of business.
Steere then claimed (and still claims) antibiotics were miraculous in treating Lyme disease.
wrong! long term antibiotics are often required to treat chronic Lyme (labeled post-Lyme syndrome--the equivalent of "bad blood"--by the CDC's Tuskegee scientists).
So... what do all these false positions have in common? They are excuses for denial of the required long-term antibiotics (that saved my life) so that a vaccine could be developed and marketed and symptom treatments sold by big pharma.
While denying his patients effective treatment, Allen Steere monitored the immune reaction of his untreated controls for his employer (Yale Corporation) which subsequently invented and licensed the first commercial Lyme vaccine based on these observations. Steere then led the trials for the vaccine for a pharmaceuticals company. (The vaccine induced the symptoms it was supposed to prevent--much like Steere's treatment protocols--and it was pulled from the market).
Lyme has been very profitable for the grant-seeking establishment "experts" and the pharma companies they consult for, which make money treating the symptoms in perpetuity rather than eliminating the underlying cause. Meanwhile many academics-on-the-take have made fortunes and built their careers getting grants and starting companies to study a disease they tell the public is "hard to catch and easy to cure". (Their grant and patent applications tell the truth about the disease epidemic they have manufactured with the simple-minded lies they tell the public.)
Being an establishment Lyme expert means never having to say you're sorry... while cashing in on the untold misery of others.
“First off, they said it was a new disease, which it wasn’t. Then it was thought to be viral, but it isn’t. Then it was thought that sero-negativity didn’t exist, which it does. They thought it was easily treated by short courses of antibiotics, which sometimes it isn’t. Then it was only the Ixodes dammini tick, which we now know is not even a separate valid tick species.
If you look throughout the history, almost every time a major dogmatic statement has been made about what we ‘know’ about this disease, it was subsequently proven wrong or underwent major modifications.”.
--The late Dr. Ed Masters on the track record of the so-called Lyme experts.
“Never would I have deemed it possible that a group of medical people would work so vigorously and with such malice against a group of desperately ill people. But, here it is.”.
–Lyme victim/activist (requested anonymity for fear of reprisal).
The establishment 'expert' on Lyme disease is Allen Steere (formerly of Yale). Gary Wormser's IDSA treatment denial guidelines merely institutionalized Steere's deliberately erroneous positions over the years:
Steere initially claimed Lyme was cause by a virus.
wrong! there is no such virus.
Steere claimed Lyme was spread by Ixodes dammini ticks.
wrong! there is no such tick species.
Steere and his Yale group initially claimed an...tibiotics did nothing for Lyme disease.
wrong! doctors all around him were having success treating Lyme with antibiotics (too bad for Steere's Tuskegee patients)--Steere ridiculed these doctors and helped put them out of business.
Steere then claimed (and still claims) antibiotics were miraculous in treating Lyme disease.
wrong! long term antibiotics are often required to treat chronic Lyme (labeled post-Lyme syndrome--the equivalent of "bad blood"--by the CDC's Tuskegee scientists).
So... what do all these false positions have in common? They are excuses for denial of the required long-term antibiotics (that saved my life) so that a vaccine could be developed and marketed and symptom treatments sold by big pharma.
While denying his patients effective treatment, Allen Steere monitored the immune reaction of his untreated controls for his employer (Yale Corporation) which subsequently invented and licensed the first commercial Lyme vaccine based on these observations. Steere then led the trials for the vaccine for a pharmaceuticals company. (The vaccine induced the symptoms it was supposed to prevent--much like Steere's treatment protocols--and it was pulled from the market).
Lyme has been very profitable for the grant-seeking establishment "experts" and the pharma companies they consult for, which make money treating the symptoms in perpetuity rather than eliminating the underlying cause. Meanwhile many academics-on-the-take have made fortunes and built their careers getting grants and starting companies to study a disease they tell the public is "hard to catch and easy to cure". (Their grant and patent applications tell the truth about the disease epidemic they have manufactured with the simple-minded lies they tell the public.)
Being an establishment Lyme expert means never having to say you're sorry... while cashing in on the untold misery of others.
“First off, they said it was a new disease, which it wasn’t. Then it was thought to be viral, but it isn’t. Then it was thought that sero-negativity didn’t exist, which it does. They thought it was easily treated by short courses of antibiotics, which sometimes it isn’t. Then it was only the Ixodes dammini tick, which we now know is not even a separate valid tick species.
If you look throughout the history, almost every time a major dogmatic statement has been made about what we ‘know’ about this disease, it was subsequently proven wrong or underwent major modifications.”.
--The late Dr. Ed Masters on the track record of the so-called Lyme experts.
“Never would I have deemed it possible that a group of medical people would work so vigorously and with such malice against a group of desperately ill people. But, here it is.”.
–Lyme victim/activist (requested anonymity for fear of reprisal).
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