Morgellons news

[taniaaust1]

Ive had lots of symptoms with my ME and one of those was Morgellon's for a while (12-18mths?)) and if you talk to this patient group you see that many of the things which ME/CFS people have, this group often gets too eg IBS, severe fatigue, memory and concentration issues etc. though all that isn't mentioned in this article and they just mention the memory/concentration issues in news article

(a good list of morgellons symptoms here http://www.rense.com/general74/morg4.htm ). Anyway there seems to maybe be a group who get coexisting Morgellon's with their ME/CFS (Im almost sure for me it was a coexisting to this illness and not me getting some other "rare" illness !).

Anyway I think it was interesting to see this little heard about condition in the news again so just wanted to share that this illness (which some could get as a rare symptom of their ME) has made it in the news again. If you get this issue (I think most are reluctant to talk about this one), its not hard to miss due the intense itchiness and sooner or later you will see a skin manifestation (for myself it was small clear hard granules coming out of my skin). Mainstream news article on Morgellons below

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/joni-mitchells-battle-with-morgellons-disease-20150403-1mdtnz.html.html.html?eid=cpc:nnn-14omn2215-optim-nnnutbrain-05/01/2015-outbrain_paid-dom-displayad-nnn-smh-nnn&campaign_code=15caf001&promote_channel=sem&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=paid outbrain

Sometimes it got so bad I couldn't walk and I'd have to crawl across the floor. My legs would cramp up, just like I was having a polio spasm," she told the author of the book, Malka Marom.
Mitchell had polio when she was nine.

 

[Esther12]

To me it seems that there are even more unfair prejudices around 'Morgellon's' than CFS - and we're hard to beat.

For many doctors it seems default to assume 'delusional parasitosis', even when patient's don't think (rightly or wrongly) that they have a problem with parasites. If I was having a problem with lots of itching and other morgellon's related symptoms, I think I'd want to avoid a Morgellon's diagnosis.

 

[Hip]

To me it seems that there are even more unfair prejudices around 'Morgellon's' than CFS - and we're hard to beat.

Absolutely. It seems that Morgellons got quickly tarred with the psychosomatic / somatization / delusional brush, and like all medical conditions that have the misfortune of being classified in this way, most serious biomedical research on the disease is then halted as a result, and the disease then languishes in sort of scientific limbo.

Once a disease is classified as psychosomatic, it is the kiss-of-death, as far as serious biomedical research on the cause or treatment of the disease is concerned.

In my view, it should be made illegal to medically classify a disease as psychosomatic, unless there is an incredible weight of empirical evidence to back it up. And there rarely is, because psychosomatic ideas are shrouded in quackery.

It's just too easy for psychiatrists to say "all in the mind", and then consign that disease into scientific obscurity, where little further biomedical research is performed on it.

 

[Martial]

There was a good article done recently linking morgellons to infectious disease origin.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257881/

 

[ahmo]

@Martial Thanks for this link. When I first sqw this post, I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory re Morgellons. In what I now understand to be their inimitable style, the article opens with the following quote. Mike Adams has been running a campaign against Wikipedia for their smearing of any type of alternative health remedy.

Morgellons (/mɔː(ɹ)ˈdʒɛlənz/, also called Morgellons disease or Morgellons syndrome) is a condition whose sufferers have the delusional belief that they are infested with disease-causing agents described as things like insects, parasites, hairs or fibers, while in reality no such things are present.[1]

 

[Martial]

@Martial Thanks for this link. When I first sqw this post, I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory re Morgellons. In what I now understand to be their inimitable style, the article opens with the following quote. Mike Adams has been running a campaign against Wikipedia for their smearing of any type of alternative health remedy.

Yeah I saw the same thing before, it is bizarre because new medical evidence like the article I posted proves otherwise. And chronic lyme is depression and laziness, and CFS is lack of motivation and not enough work ethic, yada, yada, yada... lol

 

[picante]

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/joni-mitchells-battle-with-morgellons-disease-

"Morgellons first made an appearance in 2006 when patients, mostly in northern California in the US, complained about a mysterious skin disease, according to the Centre for Disease Control.

The centre launched an investigation into the illness in 2008 and found "no infectious causes" for it."

When the establishment works hard to bury a disease with the "psych" labels, I suspect it's usually connected with a toxic exposure that someone doesn't want anybody to know about.

But didn't Morgellons appear before 2006? Are there other cluster areas?

 

[Hip]

There was a good article done recently linking morgellons to infectious disease origin.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257881/

If you read the history on the talk page of the Wikipedia Morgellons article, you will notice that quite a few people have tried to get that study you cited (and others) linking morgellons to infectious disease into the Wikipedia article, but the Wikipedia editors involved with that article just flatly and obstinately reject it.

These self-appointed editors say that the study is only a primary source, not a secondary source. A primary source is a single study on a subject; a secondary source is something like a review study or an academic text book, which tends to weigh up the evidence from multiple single studies in order to arrive at a more considered conclusion. Secondary sources carry more weight in Wikipedia.

There are unfortunately secondary sources publish by the somatization shrinks that suggest Morgellons is best seen as a delusional parasitosis condition. Those secondary sources carry more weight, by Wikipedia editing rules. So their viewpoint dominates the article.

However, there is nothing in the Wikipedia editing rules that prevent primary sources also being included along with secondary sources. So it would be possible to have a Morgellons article that included both the delusional parasitosis view, as well as the alternative view that there is an infectious process going on in Morgellons.

However, if you read the talk page archives, you will see that the editors of that article tend to attack all people arriving with suggestions that the infectious view of Morgellons should also be included in the article.



There are in fact several studies which provide evidence for Morgellons being an infectious disease, caused by a spirochete infection of the skin (likely Borrelia), and provide evidence the skin lesions in Morgellons are not delusional but real. See the following studies:


Studies Linking Morgellons To An Infectious Disease:

Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients

Morgellons: a novel dermatological perspective as the multi system infective disease borreliosis

Association of spirochetal infection with Morgellons disease

Characterization and evolution of dermal filaments from patients with Morgellons disease

Morgellons Disease: A Chemical and Light Microscopic Study

Filament formation associated with spirochetal infection: a comparative approach to Morgellons disease

Morgellons disease: Analysis of a population with clinically confirmed microscopic subcutaneous fibers of unknown etiology

Morgellons disease, illuminating an undefined illness: a case series

The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion?

 

[picante]

and provide evidence the skin lesions in Morgellons are not delusional but real.

I think anyone who denied the skin lesions would be delusional themselves. So in order to make it a "delusional" illness, they had to think up something else ... let's see, how about parasites? Let's say they all imagine they have parasites!

 

[Hip]

I think anyone who denied the skin lesions would be delusional themselves. So in order to make it a "delusional" illness, they had to think up something else ... let's see, how about parasites? Let's say they all imagine they have parasites!

I think one idea proposed was that the skin lesions might be self inflicted through scratching.

However, the idea the skin in infected with parasites comes from the Morgellons patients themselves; this did not come from the psychiatrists; what the psychiatrists said was that the skin infection the patient reported was delusional.

But this study found that 24 out the 25 Morgellons patients tested had the Borrelia in their skin lesions, indicating that the lesions were likely caused by an infection.


A lot of the Morgellons patients do suffer from genuine psychosis though, to varying degrees, so there can be mental health issues involved as well. The disease is quite a complex picture. The spirochete bacterium Borrelia has been known to cause psychosis, as has another famous spirochete bacterium, Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis.

 

[ahmo]

@Hip thanks for these excellent references. This one included a really interesting reference to the CDC's view, which seems to both uphold the position that the fibers are from fabric, (ie implanted by the delusional person) and that they are protein, not cellulose.

A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded that most of the filaments collected from MD dermatological lesions were cellulose, likely of cotton origin.12 In contradiction to their own conclusion, however, the authors of the CDC study reported that material collected from MD patients was over 83% protein in composition and subsequently that collected material was “likely superficial skin or cellulose consistent with cotton fibers.”12 This sample composition is consistent with keratin or other proteins rather than cellulose. The conclusions of the CDC study are contradictory, because cellulose is a carbohydrate rather than a protein and if 83% of samples were composed of protein, then only a minor percentage of samples (17% at most) could exclusively be composed of cellulose. The protein findings can be better explained by the possibility that the major proportion of patient samples included keratin and collagen fibers, while a minor portion of the samples included nonprotein debris that accidentally adhered to open wounds.