3 ms·
That's fair. But I'd rather humor the quackish side of chronic lyme and see some progress being made, rather than lean to the side of dismissing them, along wit
by kortex 5y ago
That's fair. But I'd rather humor the quackish side of chronic lyme and see some progress being made, rather than lean to the side of dismissing them, along with people with legitimate complaints.
The inability to adequately assay Lyme speaks more to how bad we are at assaying diseases, than to the (il-)legitimacy of the disease.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> But I'd rather humor the quackish side of chronic lyme and see some progress being made, That would have the opposite effect, because many (or likely most) of them never actually had Lyme disease. That’s the problem: “Chronic Lyme” has attracted too many pseudoscience practitioners who lazily blame everything on undetectable Lyme. They diagnose based on symptoms alone and/or employ tests with known extreme false positive rates while dismissing mainstream tests that have been validated. The more you mix those false patients into the real Lyme population, the more you dilute the real signal from actual patients. Humoring the quackery doesn’t advance the science. If you want progress to be made in a field, it’s important to be diligent about keeping the quackery out.
- babyblueblanket 5y agoThe issue with humoring the quackish side of chronic lyme is that you swiftly get into supposed treatments that are, in fact, quackery or can be actively harmful to patients (such as extremely long antibiotic treatments). So you risk both wasting money and harming people by humoring stuff you know is nonsense.