RANT: Dear Daily Beast & Dr. Russell Saunder and all other uneducated-chronic-Lyme-doesn’t-exist followers


Yolanda Foster: With Lyme Disease, 'I Have Lost The Ability To Read, Write, Or Even Watch TV'I have been following the story of Yolanda Foster for quite some time because I get it. I am a Lyme survivor and so are my kids. She has exemplified bravery and vulnerability that should be rewarded, but instead she is getting smeared.

Why dear media are you so quick to judge a famous person using her power and popularity to be open and to help others? What could be your motivation to smear Ms. Foster? What do you have to gain by her being discredited?

I have had just about all I could have this week with incorrect or smearing articles about Lyme and Yolanda. I have just had all I could have before SPEAKING OUT. The latest diatribe from THE DAILY BEAST – ugh, it sent me off the cliff.

Whether or not you wrote your article, Dr. Saunders, to fuel the fire and make sure you got attention, negative or otherwise, I’ll never be sure as of we have never met. I don’t know your character, doctor, or your personal thoughts or decisions.

Be that as it may, people who talk about things they have no experience in as if they are experienced to lead people astray are an abomination.

Using your platform, Daily Beast,  to educate people improperly on what chronic Lyme is maliciousness. Smearing Yolanda Foster’s name and health across national news while she and her family suffer like this smacks of vindictiveness.

If I don’t understand how to engineer an airplane, but can engineer a train, why would I be writing national news articles about engineering an airplane and who in their right mind would consider me an expert enough to publish it?

I am a mom, but not a mom who has adopted children, or who has lost a child outside the womb, or who has raised triplets, so I don’t go around writing experts articles about those things. I write about the things I encounter every day as a Lyme mom and the mom of Lyme kids. That is what I am an expert in, whether you agree with my opinion or not is entirely up to you, but you cannot disagree with my level of expertise.

I am tired of reading articles from MDs across the country countering the evidence that chronic Lyme exists. They are not even arguing about the treatment, but if it exists. These are not laboratory scientists, or university research MDs who have spent a lifetime or decades studying the illness and hundreds of patients. These are regular old medical doctors. And guess what I have a news flash (get ready for it)……

If these types of doctors like Dr. Saunders are advertising and blabbering on about the fact that it doesn’t exist, do you really think chronic Lyme patients are flocking to his practice to give him the experience he so desperately needs?

No. They are running for the hills and going to doctors that know and understand the illness and have experienced it first hand.

Post partum depression exists because some doctor took the time to analyze and study and test the hormone levels of women after giving birth. Just because it “looks” abstract and different for each women after birth doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. Just because everyone who gives birth doesn’t get it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

How can we so advanced as a civilization and still single out some disease like Lyme and not run it through the same scientific system we have all the others.

I would have really liked to see you, doctor, look a dying AIDS patients in the eye 30 years ago and tell them HIV didn’t exist because everyone who gets HIV doesn’t contract AIDS. So, that’s the scientific filter we are running it through? Really?

Everyone who gets cancer doesn’t die, everyone who gets chemo doesn’t live, everyone who gets the chicken pox doesn’t get shingles. Do we not see a pattern here?

But yet, as a media outlet you have the audacity to print something so ludicrious about the very existence of Lyme with no street or scientific value.

Apparently you have never loved someone who is suffering from chronic Lyme disease and I pray you never will…..but those odds are changing and it is coming for you or someone you love.

The unknown, unpopularity of Lyme disease is coming to a town or theatre near you sooner than you think. Will you know it? Will you catch it soon enough to not “almost die” and lose 80% of your life first? Not if you keep only reading or publishing nonsense. Guess what – the odds are right now someone you love already has Lyme or one of its coinfections. It is dormant and lying in wait for the opening to create one of its vast autoimmune disorders and break you down slowly one organ at a time.

What kind of doctor do you want treating your “mystery” illness, one like Dr. Saunders who wouldn’t believe you, or a doctor who would worry less about names and diagnosis and existence and more about your health and healing. Not a tough decision here.

It is painful, it is ugly, it is unique and individual, it is debilitating, it is scary, it is horrific, it is devastating, it is expensive, it is confusing, it is deadly.

It is real. It is very real. (use your best Yoda voice for emphasis here )

(Dedicated to Yolanda Foster, her family and doctors- keep being brave and real, we are on your side)

Blessings and healing,

Janice Fairbairn

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