"The Truth About Chronic Lyme Disease" - disinformation campaign in action

[Antares in NYC]

I just came across this article in Yahoo News purporting to tell us "the truth about Lyme disease," but only spouts the IDSA mantra that Lyme is difficult to catch, easy to treat, and it never persists chronically.

The article is riddled with propaganda, misinformation and even patently false data (the author claims only 30,000 cases are reported in the USA each year; the official numbers from the CDC are over 300,000 per year).

Furthermore, the author Laura Tedesco interviews two prominent ID doctors about the Lyme epidemic... IDSA Lyme panel member Paul Auwaerter, MD and IDSA guidelines subscriber John Aucott MD. So you can imagine the "truths" they tell us about Lyme disease:

• Difficult to catch
• Easy to treat with short course antibiotics
• People that remain sick either have CFS, are confused about what they have, or have PTLD (the IDSA fabrication of "post-treatment Lyme disease), which they can't exactly prove or treat.
• Auwaerter claims all LLMDs are fraudulent and that the IDSA guidelines are adequate to get rid of the Lyme infection... Interestingly, this article came out in August 2015, around the same time that Auwaerter released a research study with Dr. Zhang proving the persistence of the borrelia bacterium despite antibiotic treatment. He keeps saying one thing to the public, and the complete opposite in the lab.

The entire article feels like stenography for the IDSA doctors interviewed, without much critical thinking, and posing the thesis that people who think may have Lyme years after treatment, don't have Lyme. It may be in their heads, they could have CFS (a convenient "catch-all" diagnostic), or they could have this nebulous syndrome they have not proven called PTLD, so they should not seek any help from LLMDs.

What's even more remarkable, Aucott tells us that they will "develop a test to determine if someone has PTLD". Let me guess, it will be an IgG test that proves you "had" the illness before.

That sounds as sincere as when O.J. Simpson announced he was going to find the "real killers".

Sure thing, doctor. Sure thing. Keep peeing on us and tell us it's raining.

Here's the propaganda piece, for your reference:

The Truth About Chronic Lyme Disease
Laura Tedesco
August 14, 2015

https://www.yahoo.com/health/the-truth-about-chronic-lyme-disease-126509930222.html

Last summer, South Carolina resident Julie Rambo felt totally rundown, unable to recover from the birth of her fourth child the year prior. “I felt like I was dragging myself around,” she recalls. Rambo, now 35, found brief respite in her garden — ironically, the same place she would acquire an illness that would leave her in excruciating pain and often bedridden for the better part of a year.
(...)

Read it at your own peril, and feel free to tell Laura Tedesco how one-sided and inaccurate is that article she wrote.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

You have to ask WHY they are so determined to deny the truth?

1) Standard Operating Procedure: the Mushroom Treatment
Keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit
the Elite don't want us asking questions, they want us fractured, hating, supporting war, supporting Elite Oligarch scum with multiple mansions while everything else falls apart for us all

2) Standard Operating Procedure: Smoke Screen to hide the fact the medical profession doesn't know very much, is a cult that extorts money and if we realize they aren't omniscient and deserve a kick in the pants, that giant pharmaceutical business is in trouble

3) Standard Operating Procedure: deny anything that could possibly make it look like the "system" screwed up
can't have peons asking questions, or worse, doubting the Emperor has any clothes on...
Can't have lawsuits in huge numbers demanding compensation
so, the "system is NEVER wrong". Until it's forced to admit it by extreme circumstance

4) It's a biological weapon. The US screwed up and let out, and there's been a quiet push to have the whole thing silenced.
Folk will accept the Russians had several catastrophic accidents with anthrax and smallpox biological weapons, but "oh noes!! the good guys don't do that! Only bad Russkis do that!"
Bullshit! US and UK had numerous and widespread bio chem warfare systems, and thus, associated accidents
Some of the testing was utterly insane :/

 

[duncan]

There is a simple litmus test for truth that Lyme patients share with ME/CFS patients: Experience. We recognize the half-truths and deceit and falsehoods about how the patient community is being characterized. We know when what they write about how our disease impacts us is blatantly false.

It used to be it was a one-sided and closed conversation. It no longer is. Now we are more frequently - and ably - speaking out against those misrepresentations.

Chalk that up to the Internet, at least in part.