lyme disease
oracknows | June 20, 2017In pseudomedicine, fake diseases predominate. Basically, fake diseases are diseases that do not exist in conventional medicine as diagnostic entities because there does not exist sufficient sufficient evidence to support them as one or there exists compelling evidence that they are not. Naturopaths, for instance, like to diagnose people with "adrenal fatigue," which is one of the prototypical "fake diseases." Basically, it involves a constellation of vague symptoms that may include a combination of several of the following: fatigue, inability to handle stress, cravings for salty foods,…
gregladen | April 21, 2016Somebody just sent me this lyme disease infographic. It is too big to just display on a blog post, so here is the link to the full size graphic. It may come in handy this Spring/Summer!
kkrisberg | January 22, 2016It’s been nearly two decades since the last publication of a nationwide survey on the distribution of blacklegged ticks — the primary transmitters of Lyme disease. That survey, released in 1998, reported the tick in 30 percent of U.S. counties. Today, a new study using similar surveillance methods has found the tick in more than 45 percent of counties.
“These kinds of changes tend to be gradual,” study co-author Rebecca Eisen, a research biologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, told me. “But when you see the cumulative change over 20…
tsmith | June 23, 2012This is the last of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Jessica Waters.
Climatologists have been warning us about the ongoing and impending consequences of global warming for years. But the results of climate change affect more than just polar bears and penguins - if you live anywhere in the northeastern, north-central or west coast states of the U.S.., you could be at a greater risk for contracting Lyme Disease.
Lyme disease is an infection of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium that is spread through black legged ticks (otherwise known as deer ticks) who feed on the white footed mouse…
sa smith | December 8, 2010Trine Tsouderos has done it again!
She is a one woman, woo-fighting machine!
She has taken on anti-vaxers.
She has taken on Dr. Oz.
She has taken on XMRV-->CFS.
And now shes goin after a rare wooity-- Chronic Lyme Disease:Lyme disease is real. The bacterial infection, chiefly transmitted by deer ticks, can cause rashes, swollen joints and inflamed nerves, and usually is curable with a round of antibiotics.
But doctors around the country are telling patients with common medical problems such as back pain, poor concentration and fatigue that their ailments stem from a chronic form of Lyme…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
palmd | May 5, 2009I recently had a pleasant, brief email exchange with Kris Newby, the producer of the latest medical advocacy pic, Under Our Skin. There's been a number of similar movies lately, mostly about quacky cancer therapies. This one is apparently much better made, and follows the controversy regarding "chronic" Lyme disease.
I'd heard an interview about the movie on Diane Rehm, and was rather unnerved by it. It sounded like a typical I-drank-the-Kool-Aid-now-I'm-gonna-make-a-movie kind of thing. Still, I haven't written about it, because I haven't seen the movie. That's going to change. Kris…
palmd | March 16, 2009Thankfully, I don't receive all that much blog-related mail. But this weekend I received several communications about a piece in popular liberal blog. The piece is (ostensibly) about Lyme disease, which coincidentally happens to be one of the topics of my first post here at SBM. In fact, I've written about Lyme disease a number of times, and Dr. Novella has a very good summary of the controversy at one of his other blogs. Since we've discussed this so many times, I won't be reviewing the entire controversy, but looking at this particular blog post to examine how our personal experiences…
purepedantry | March 10, 2009Did you catch this story? A man in Illinois walks into a church and shoots the pastor. After killing the pastor, his gun jams, he grabs a knife and starts stabbing himself. At which point, he is tackled by two guys and remanded into custody.
Now his lawyer is claiming that his mental status was impaired because he had Lyme disease. (And, shocker: this interpretation of the story is being pushed over at Huffington Post.)
Listen, this guy may be crazy. In fact, he undoubtedly has severe emotional and neurological problems. But Lyme disease isn't why.
Lyme disease is caused by a…
palmd | March 9, 2009A pastor in Illinois was shot and killed over the weekend. A similar tragedy happened in my community many years ago. Religious leaders are very public figures and have an emotional connection with members of their communities, so I suppose it's not so strange that they should be targets. Many of the cases I have read about over the years involved a mentally ill assailant, as it appears the Illinois case did. Mental illness doesn't usually lead to violence, but one can certainly imagine how a particularly disturbing delusion could lead someone to violence. The American mental health…
palmd | February 4, 2009So I was checking out my incomming links on sitemeter and I found a great one. You see, fake diseases alway bring out the wackos.
This is the thing about medical wackos. Not only do they think that they have diseases that no real doctor thinks exists, but they think everyone else must have it, too.
Niels, a guy who I've had to ban before for hostile comment spam, and whose designation on his own board is, appropriately, "Ultimate Member", has this to say about my back woes:
this time, i believe karma has already taught him the lesson he needs to learn (sounds like he has lyme disease...…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2007tags: Lab 257, Plum Island,animal disease research, USDA, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, Dutch duck plague
After the recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK was shown to be the result this virus's escape from one of two nearby research labs, I thought it was timely to review a book that investigates this same occurrence in the United States. Lab 257: the Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory (NYC: William Morrow; 2004) by Michael Christopher Carroll, is the riveting story of an animal disease research lab located on an 840-acre island that is only…