4 ms·

To be fair to the article it does state that people who get Lyme disease for real sometimes have lingering symptoms like you describe. The article isn’t about t

To be fair to the article it does state that people who get Lyme disease for real sometimes have lingering symptoms like you describe. The article isn’t about that, it’s about quack doctors prescribing huge amounts of antibiotics to people who never had a Lyme infection, whose symptoms are likely psychosomatic. Most of the symptoms read like stress, depression, and exhaustion to me.

nosianu 7y ago
> Most of the symptoms read like stress, depression, and exhaustion to me. Apart from the first one in your list, do you think the other ones are "spiritual"? To me, giving those as a "final verdict" is not dissimilar to blaming a deity. Everything has a material basis in my book. Myself, and you can see a few posts in my history about it, I was diagnosed with chronic mercury poisoning. I was fortunate indeed that I actually had clearly elevated levels of mercury in blood and urine - but that was because of some strange coincidences coming together. Normally someone like me would not be so easily to diagnose, in chronic exposure levels on the "highways" of your body (blood) are very low. I had lots of issues that I ignored, I was fit and all the many many small issues (see some pasts comments for some of them) were easily ignored. Not because they didn't matter, they did make life inconvenient to say the least, and how far my brain was impacted I only realized in the years of chelation when I could suddenly comprehend things much, much better. You don't realize the impact yourself because you have nothing to compare yourself against, since the change is so slow and gradual! If I had ever gone to a doctor with any of those symptoms I would have gotten exactly your advice: It's just stress, it's psychosomatic. Don't worry so much. For what it's worth, my own doctor, researcher at a university clinic, thinks the heavy metal problem is vastly under-appreciated. For the same reason as was mentioned in this thread: It's really next to impossible to diagnose with what we have. We can only diagnose acute poisoning, meaning when it is still present in blood in large amounts. Current teaching is "no amount of lead (but same for mercury, which is even worse - and both together are several orders of magnitude more toxic according to an LD study somewhere on PubMed) is safe" and many people are aware of it. But somehow this is too abstract for anyone who has not been impacted (or does not know about it, very likely when it happens). But anyone who shows up with mild symptoms is told "it's in your head". We can, sort of, make a connection between heavy metals and populations. But we are unable to use that knowledge for any individual, because while we can show that there is a population level impact we have no way to do the far harder thing and show that an individual has been impacted. So we have a disconnect between what we know and what we can actually do, since treatment cannot be done on the population level apart from what has already been done (but even so there's plenty of heavy metal exposure left, as became clear after Flint in headlines for far more places than just that one city and issue). Just to clarify, I'm not saying "everything undiagnosable is a heavy metal issue", I'm saying everything has a material basis. Among them environmental issues play next to no role - for the simple reason that we don't have the means to diagnose them (even if we did get accurate numbers about what is stored in somebody's body we still have no way of saying of what that actually means). The problem is that "we cannot diagnose it" turns into "you have nothing, it's all in your head" because what you don't know exists does not exist. I certainly see why there is little point in teaching much about it to doctors given what I wrote, that there simply are not even good ways to diagnose it. One has to remember doctors are not researchers. They don't go for the novel ideas and the unknown, they are not supposed to work like a production line worker, albeit very well-paid ones: Use known-to-work methods for known issues. Next (patient)!
- freetime2 7y ago
  > If I had ever gone to a doctor with any of those symptoms I would have gotten exactly your advice: It's just stress, it's psychosomatic. Don't worry so much. Or what if you had gone to a "lyme literate" doctor and been misdiagnosed with chronic lyme disease? Put on antibiotics for three years (like one of the patients in the story) with harmful side effects, and at enormous financial cost? Then you would have a whole bunch of problems in addition to your mercury poisoning. I realize that it must suck for the patient, but in cases where no diagnosis can be made I think the best thing a doctor can do is just to say "I don't know", treat the symptoms as much as possible, and prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) in the hopes that things clear up on their own, or that some test eventually reveals some useful information. Better to do nothing than to actively harm the patient with ineffective treatments.
  - moby_click 7y ago
    > treat the symptoms as much as possible, and prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) That's pretty much what I have been doing, when I was 19. But I became sick, saw a couple of doctors without a diagnosis and that prescrption would have sounded like: "Have you tried not being sick anymore?" I had to wait for a NSAID to kick in to get down liquid food, had to sleep often, because I could only sleep for few hours at a time and everyday life was exercise enough. At that point blood tests for lyme were inconclusive, but the rheumatologist thought the symptoms warranted oral doxycycline, which cleared the symptoms within days. Maybe a lumbar puncture would have shown it, but I was asymptomatic before I was scheduled. Like nosianu experienced, there was a long period where I thought, I just had to get my act together and it takes a while to conclude that something is seriously wrong. At some point, you take a doctor's educated guess, even if the treatment is harmful.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    > prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) in the hopes that things clear up on their own, People don't want that, they want pills dulling the symptoms of their bad habits.
  - nosianu 7y ago

nosianu 7y ago

> Most of the symptoms read like stress, depression, and exhaustion to me. Apart from the first one in your list, do you think the other ones are "spiritual"? To me, giving those as a "final verdict" is not dissimilar to blaming a deity. Everything has a material basis in my book. Myself, and you can see a few posts in my history about it, I was diagnosed with chronic mercury poisoning. I was fortunate indeed that I actually had clearly elevated levels of mercury in blood and urine - but that was because of some strange coincidences coming together. Normally someone like me would not be so easily to diagnose, in chronic exposure levels on the "highways" of your body (blood) are very low. I had lots of issues that I ignored, I was fit and all the many many small issues (see some pasts comments for some of them) were easily ignored. Not because they didn't matter, they did make life inconvenient to say the least, and how far my brain was impacted I only realized in the years of chelation when I could suddenly comprehend things much, much better. You don't realize the impact yourself because you have nothing to compare yourself against, since the change is so slow and gradual! If I had ever gone to a doctor with any of those symptoms I would have gotten exactly your advice: It's just stress, it's psychosomatic. Don't worry so much. For what it's worth, my own doctor, researcher at a university clinic, thinks the heavy metal problem is vastly under-appreciated. For the same reason as was mentioned in this thread: It's really next to impossible to diagnose with what we have. We can only diagnose acute poisoning, meaning when it is still present in blood in large amounts. Current teaching is "no amount of lead (but same for mercury, which is even worse - and both together are several orders of magnitude more toxic according to an LD study somewhere on PubMed) is safe" and many people are aware of it. But somehow this is too abstract for anyone who has not been impacted (or does not know about it, very likely when it happens). But anyone who shows up with mild symptoms is told "it's in your head". We can, sort of, make a connection between heavy metals and populations. But we are unable to use that knowledge for any individual, because while we can show that there is a population level impact we have no way to do the far harder thing and show that an individual has been impacted. So we have a disconnect between what we know and what we can actually do, since treatment cannot be done on the population level apart from what has already been done (but even so there's plenty of heavy metal exposure left, as became clear after Flint in headlines for far more places than just that one city and issue). Just to clarify, I'm not saying "everything undiagnosable is a heavy metal issue", I'm saying everything has a material basis. Among them environmental issues play next to no role - for the simple reason that we don't have the means to diagnose them (even if we did get accurate numbers about what is stored in somebody's body we still have no way of saying of what that actually means). The problem is that "we cannot diagnose it" turns into "you have nothing, it's all in your head" because what you don't know exists does not exist. I certainly see why there is little point in teaching much about it to doctors given what I wrote, that there simply are not even good ways to diagnose it. One has to remember doctors are not researchers. They don't go for the novel ideas and the unknown, they are not supposed to work like a production line worker, albeit very well-paid ones: Use known-to-work methods for known issues. Next (patient)!

freetime2 7y ago
> If I had ever gone to a doctor with any of those symptoms I would have gotten exactly your advice: It's just stress, it's psychosomatic. Don't worry so much. Or what if you had gone to a "lyme literate" doctor and been misdiagnosed with chronic lyme disease? Put on antibiotics for three years (like one of the patients in the story) with harmful side effects, and at enormous financial cost? Then you would have a whole bunch of problems in addition to your mercury poisoning. I realize that it must suck for the patient, but in cases where no diagnosis can be made I think the best thing a doctor can do is just to say "I don't know", treat the symptoms as much as possible, and prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) in the hopes that things clear up on their own, or that some test eventually reveals some useful information. Better to do nothing than to actively harm the patient with ineffective treatments.
- moby_click 7y ago
  > treat the symptoms as much as possible, and prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) That's pretty much what I have been doing, when I was 19. But I became sick, saw a couple of doctors without a diagnosis and that prescrption would have sounded like: "Have you tried not being sick anymore?" I had to wait for a NSAID to kick in to get down liquid food, had to sleep often, because I could only sleep for few hours at a time and everyday life was exercise enough. At that point blood tests for lyme were inconclusive, but the rheumatologist thought the symptoms warranted oral doxycycline, which cleared the symptoms within days. Maybe a lumbar puncture would have shown it, but I was asymptomatic before I was scheduled. Like nosianu experienced, there was a long period where I thought, I just had to get my act together and it takes a while to conclude that something is seriously wrong. At some point, you take a doctor's educated guess, even if the treatment is harmful.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > prescribe lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, sleep) in the hopes that things clear up on their own, People don't want that, they want pills dulling the symptoms of their bad habits.
- nosianu 7y ago