Well I began my day thinking calming, living calmly then in sitting down at my computer to work, I perused the FB airwaves to check in on the Lyme community. Then I am hit smack between the eyes with an article completely assaulting Yolanda Foster for her recent comments comparing Lyme disease to HIV/AIDS. (From Daily Mail – HERE)
I’m really not a conspiracy theorist, but what is it about the media – ALL MEDIA, that doesn’t want Lyme disease to be what it is? What is it about seeing her comments that made this journalist get defensive instead of investigate? Does he or she have HIV? I doubt it. Do they personally know and dislike Yolanda Foster? I doubt it.
You see, we tend to dismiss instead of investigate or listen in our current culture. I understand that for the everyday person, but not for doctors, not for journalists.It is your job to listen, to ask and to investigate. When did being a journalist become like “mean girls” where you just snob someone out because you don’t believe them?
It is completely unacceptable and seems to the rest of us to be on purpose. Very mean and very on purpose.
What possible reason could you have, Mr. Journalist for the Daily Mail, to disregard Ms. Foster? What not take her information and look into it?
How dare you look down your nose at her plight and think somehow she has manufactured it. How dare you throw out such a false statement from one measly doctor, Dr. Brad McKay, saying “people who get HIV die and people with Lyme disease are sick for awhile”. Are you freaking kidding me?
That is not even factual yet you printed it. Its a blatant lie. If you haven’t been at the bedside the last few months of anyone’s death decline, then get off the boat and go elsewhere.
Fact: There are 1.2 million people in the US living with HIV with 50,000 new cases anually, but only 6721 deaths were attributed to HIV/AIDS in 2014.
Fact: CDC says over 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease happen each year. Lyme disease was discovered in the 1980’s, so do you have any idea how many people are walking around with Lyme disease today? Do you have any idea how many have suffered, sold everything they owned to get treatment and have now died a slow and painful death?
So let’s talk about this part – the suffering and the death.
Maybe you’ve never looked Lyme disease in the eye in yourself or someone you love, but it is wicked, ugly and incomprehensible. If you never have and are reading this now as a skeptic, then you need to watch the YouTube video below. Maybe you feel like somehow Yolanda Foster’s journey through Lyme disease was somehow falsified because of her fame and fortune. WRONG Jack.
This disease does not depend on your lifestyle like HIV tended to do. HIV was and still is more prevalent in poor communities worldwide and is mainly transmitted by sexual intercourse. For Lyme, though, you cannot live a decent, law abiding celibate life and avoid it. You cannot wear a condom and avoid it. You cannot predict when and where Lyme disease will hit. It hits and young and the old, the rich and the poor, the religious and the aesthetic, the Muslim and the Jew, the white and the black. It hits as seemingly random as a tornado strikes down homes in a neighborhood – crushing a dozen and leaving one standing.
Can you imagine how scary it would have been back in the 80’s recognition of HIV if you could have gotten it not just from sex, but also from mosquitos, ticks, spiders, en utero, etc? There was a scare just from the sexual transmission part alone, but Lyme can be passed in so many other ways.
Very much like AIDS, the patient does not die from HIV but from a depleted immune system, but that doesn’t mean that pneumonia kills these people, but HIV did. Well, the medical community has yet to catch up to this little fact about Lyme disease and so the death counts are not being counted at all. The medical community would rather hand out dozens of autoimmune disorders and medications than to find the root cause and name it.
I’m in the Lyme community with my eyes wide open and I see people suffer until there is nothing left and die of “unknown causes”. Broke and depleted and left denied of their right to tell their story.
There is no support from insurance for proper medical treatment. The doctors that are succeeding against chronic Lyme disease are ridiculed and ostracized.
That’s the whole deal, Mr Journalist and Dr. McKay. This is Yolanda Foster’s story – not yours. When it is your story, you can tell it. You cannot deny someone their own experience and their own story but just being close minded and condescending.
How dare you? Well, if you have the balls, watch the following video. Watch Under Our Skin.
It will bring tears to your eyes and make you shiver with fear about stepping outside in the summer heat swatting at mosquitoes. And as much as I’m completely irritated and fed up with you Mr. Journalist and Dr. McKay, I wouldn’t wish chronic Lyme disease on my worst enemy. It is beyond what you could ever imagine a plague could do.
How dare you? Every time you open your mouths and publish vicious false misleading information about this disease, you keep one more person from healing and kill a dozen more. Do your research and get over yourself.
A special thank you for Jenn (jenn_kicks_lyme) for sharing her journey and being so vulnerable when her world was falling apart.
Blessings and healing,
Janice Fairbairn – The Lyme Evangelist
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