My Lyme Disease Nightmare

Lifewith Lyme

by Megan O’Rourke

The Atlantic, September 2019  

                                                

This is a sobering and thorough introduction to the subject of chronic Lyme disease, something physicians see with regularity in New England. This article is a sobering look at a patient who may have chronic Lyme. In her own words, “I was a patient of relative privilege who had access to excellent medical care. Even so, I felt terrifyingly alone.”  

“The medical establishment remains entrenched in a struggle over who can be said to have Lyme disease and whether it can become chronic – and if so why.”  It’s the Infectious Disease Specialty of America (ISDA) versus the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS).

The author found a “Lyme literate doctor” in Richard Horowitz* from Upstate New York. His treatment appeared to have helped her. She notes that “crucial questions about the cause of ongoing symptoms remain unanswered due in part to the decades-long standoff over whether and how the disease can become chronic.”

She quotes infectious disease specialist, Ramzi Asfour, an infectious disease specialist ant member of the IDSA, “Anyone who says they really understand the pathophysiology of what’s going on is oversimplifying to some degree“.

O”Rorque concludes, “I can’t say for sure that I have Lyme disease. But to imagine that I might never have found the treatment that has saved my life in every sense  -- restoring its joy – terrifies me. Not only did I suffer from a disease, but I suffered at the hands of a medical establishment that discredited my testimony end  – and simply because of my search for answers and my own lived experience – wrote me off as a loon.

* Dr. Horowitz’s office is cash only.  His website states “The office does not currently accept any form of insurance.”  Thus be prepared to spend a lot of money. 

How to Fix the Premed Curriculum - Another Try

How to Fix the Premed Curriculum - Another Try

by Richard Ratzan 

Rich Ratzan is a retired ER physician from Hartford, Connecticut who was a classics major as an undergraduate.  He has taken Lewis Thomas' modest proposal to reform the premedical curriculum to heart and recently published an essay on this in the JAMA.  He writes:

"Forty-one years ago, physician-essayist Lewis Thomas proposed that applicants to medical school who were traditional premed science majors be considered last, if at all, for admission.  Instead, he wrote, preference should be given to students who concentrated on “some central, core discipline, universal within the curricula of all the colleges, which could be used for evaluating the free range of a student’s mind, his [sic] tenacity and resolve, his innate capacity for the understanding of human beings and his affection for the human condition."

Richard Ratzan's fine essay in the August 27, 2019 JAMA updates Thomas' classic NEJM article.
Download Jama_ratzan_2019_JAMA

Also see: Lewis Thomas, How to Fix the Medical Curriculum (NEJM 1978) It begins with this prescient paragraph:



Both of these essays are worth close reading.  Dr. Ratzan's JAMA piece has beautiful images depicting Achilles and Priam.

The Brygos Painter, Hector’s Ransom Skyphos,circa 490 BCE, clay pottery (h, 250 cm),