http://katiecouric.com/videos/chronic-lyme-disease-does-it-exist/
Dr. Halprin and Dr. Horowitz battled it out on Katie Couric on Wednesday…..I am in agreement with Dr. Horowitz, chronic lyme disease needs to be redefined.
You don’t even want to know how I really feel about Dr. Halprin – well maybe I’ll go there for a minute. I am deeply sorry and troubled for all the doctors out there who feel like him and their patients who are getting ignored and not properly treated. I went to 11 such doctors and they were TERRIBLE and it was heart breaking to walk out of each of their offices thinking I will never feel better and no one can help me. Doctors like Dr. Halprin do not listen and are not worthy of the challenge of medicine.
Harsh? Maybe, but until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes and felt given up on, then you won’t understand how fully educated doctors could lack such compassion for a person so sick and just give up.
One of the most terrible things in Lyme is to not be believed. No one ever says to a cancer patient – you are just depressed because there is evidence of the tumor on an xray or CTscan. Lyme is not that easy to “see” and no one has “defined” the symptoms because they are so wide and varied per each person.
So, why is it that Dr. Halprin and all his buddies are not only oblivious to chronic Lyme, but argue in the face of it?
1. It hasn’t touched them personally. Until someone they know and love deeply gets chronic Lyme and they watch it tear them apart and 4 weeks on antibiotics not work will they realize. But how many people will have to be sick for that to happen? Chronic Lyme would be a plague by then not just an epidemic.
2. It is invisible. You can’t see it on an xray or scan. It leaves no footprint per se and it has gotten to easy to blame everything unknown on a physchotic condition requiring an antidepressant.
3. It is not popular. Follow the money trail. Until some large pharmaceutical is raking in the dough on Lyme disease, it will not be “popular” in modern medicine to have it. Medical schools won’t train and teach on it until there are “streamlined” treatments that tend to help the majority of people. Doctors are scientists and they tend to think in black and white. Ask anyone with Lyme – there are only shades of gray.
4. It requires thinking and digging. I’m not sure when doctors became more concerned with profits versus patients. When you meet someone in your workplace that wants the paycheck and doesn’t want to do the work to get it – they usually end up not getting far. How is it that our market is flooded with doctors who don’t want to put in the effort? When did they stop seeing their job as a challenge that requires the effort of research and thinking? Did they pick being a doctor as a career choice because they thought initially it would be easy because they would only see patients with 10 different traditional ailments all their lives? Where did this laziness originate?
5. It demands the time to listen. I mean really listen. If a patient tells you the anti nausea medicine is not working and they still can’t eat, then they still can’t eat. What motive does a person have to lie about feeling bad? I’m sure there are people who do and are hypochondriacs, but is the majority? Are there really people out there who have so much time and money on their hands that they want to feel sick to get attention, spend time going to doctors, have to spend tons of time on the phone with their insurance company, pop a bunch of pills? This argument is completly illogical. Doctors have gotten too jaded.
6. It takes compassion. Why does a teacher chose her profession? Because he or she loves kids. When they stop loving kids and adoring watching them learn and grow – then they cease being a good teacher. When a doctor know longer cares about the patients pain or suffering and WANT to solve it – I mean lose sleep at night because they can’t solve it – then they are no longer a good doctor. We have to start caring.
I’m almost done with my soapbox and then I’ll put it away…..for Dr. Halprin. Consider these descrepancies in what you believe about chronic Lyme and what is reality about it.
Congenital delivery – If Lyme disease can actually be passed in the womb (which it can), then how and why it spreads across the country cannot be explained by patterns on a map, connections to the east coast or migrating bird pathways. If we are passing this disease and its coinfections on to our children they that explains why people don’t get bullseye rashes.
Multiplicity – I don’t think we have a clue even now about how many different multiples of coinfections actually exist and are embedded with Lyme in all of us. That is the actual mystery medicine needs to work on and solve. Why are there so many more now?
Variety – Because not one of us Lymies has exactly the same symptoms, why does that mean that we are lying? Don’t cancer patients all have different forms of cancer and different symptoms? A person with bladder cancer has different symptoms that someone with brain cancer. It doesn’t make them wrong to feel what they feel. Just because the symptoms and infections are varied doesn’t mean they are not real. Be a scientist about your thinking – Lyme is not logical, but it is scientific. Study it.
Stalking Lyme – If Lyme disease has invaded our bodies via other methods like mosquito bites, from birth, or sexually transmitted, then it has been silently stalking our immune systems for decades or more. Slowly tearing at the fabric that keeps our bodies well. If these things are true, then it explains why there are no antibodies to the Lyme or its co-infections via blood tests. There is a difference between someone that gets flu like symptoms after a camping trip and someone who has fought 30 years of autoimmune diagnosis and discovers chronic lyme. We need to begin to have a dialog that defines the different “types” of Lyme and sections off orgination and treatment.
Thank you for all listening to me rant. I get so aggravated listening to bone headed doctors who are judging the illness without research and experience. It is a misuse of the power of credibility and influence to the media and their patients. If you don’t know then say “I don’t know” and refer them to someone who does. Don’t go on national TV and claim there is no proof.
I am living proof. So are you.
And side note to Katie – you had only 2 sides of the conversation – there are actually dozens more. Antibiotics are not the only solution and do not work for so many sick people. Ugh!
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