Stalking Dr. Steere Over Lyme Disease: “Last year, Dr. Allen Steere, one of the

world’s most renowned medical

researchers and rheumatologists, began to

fear patients. It was not so much the ones he

had treated, though he occasionally had to

worry about them too, but the ones who

had started to call his office, threatening

him, claiming he was responsible for their

suffering. They insisted that he was denying

them treatment for an acute form of chronic

Lyme disease, a strand of the ordinarily

more modest infection that they believed

slipped into the bloodstream undetected

and remained there for years, causing joint

pain, chronic fatigue, suicidal depression,

paralysis and even death. Affirming their

diagnoses were a growing number of

patient advocacy groups, practitioners and

psychiatrists who argued that the disease

had become a full-scale epidemic, a

modern-day plague crippling thousands of

Americans.

As the world’s foremost expert on the illness,

however, Steere did not believe many of

them had Lyme disease at all, but

something else — chronic fatigue or mental

illness or fibromyalgia — and he had

refused to treat them with antibiotics. Many

doctors and insurance companies had

followed his lead, and in turn, hordes of

patients had started to stalk him. ” New York Times Magazine I’m of two minds on this issue which is at the crux of modern medicine’s difficulty dealing with the mind-body problem. I agree with him that many people ill with psychiatric conditions desperately push to have their dysfunction explained in terms of a bodily ailment instead. But we understand just the very tip of the iceberg about the effects of physical illness on the “black box” of the CNS. Surely it is not true that what is merely not yet proven is automatically “unscientific.”