Long-Lyme discussed with, ‘Medical gaslighting’ harming long-COVID patients, Fong A, Healthy Debate 22-07-13:’

Healthy Debate Response 22-07-14

“‘Medical gaslighting’ harming long-COVID patients, Fong A, Healthy Debate 22-07-13:
https://healthydebate.ca/2022/07/topic/medical-gaslighting-long-covid/

“Pandemics disable people — the history lesson that policymakers ignore” -Spinney L, 2022
Thank you for the article. The golden era of discovery in medicine is over. Physicians are no
longer looking for root causes of diseases. Medicine is being driven by shareholder preferences
and shareholders are not interested in cures, new antibiotics or vaccines. The paradigm of
modern medicine is to palliate, the profits come from treatments that give the pharmaceutical
industry life-time annuities. Big Pharma sells few cures, but lots of bandages—very expensive
bandages that require lifelong refills. No pharmaceutical company is interested in finding the
cause of autoimmune disease and eradicating it. That wouldn’t be profitable. Historically the
cause of inflammation was usually found to be due to infection. Presently there are few if any
medical sleuths with microbiological training doing careful tissue research and looking for root
causes of inflammation which was usually found to be due to infection.

It is now felt that many microbes live on in the body in tissue reservoirs. This has been shown in
Ebola where bacteria and viruses can be reactivated by subsequent infections. The immune
system can detect them but can’t clear them because they are inside biofilm or cells of the CNS
such as the vagus nerve. Several infections seem to have similar pathways such as MS, Lyme,
CFS and fibromyalgia etc. The blood with its circulating antibodies would be a very poor place to
hide and the default position of physicians when they don’t find something in the blood is to
ascribe a psychiatric or idiopathic cause. Once a disease is labeled as somatoform or idiopathic
all investigation for root causes ends.

Physicians are taught in med school that we get 90% of the information we need to make
medical decisions by simply listening to the patient. But the culture of medicine has
shifted—Somehow the value of patient-provided history and insight has been eroded, leaving
the unlucky sick adrift and rudderless, just because they have an illness whose symptoms can’t
be proven.

We would hope our evolving understanding of Long COVID might spawn a broader investigation
of diseases such as long-Lyme. In the case of ME/CFS they don’t know what they are looking for
and they are looking in the wrong places –namely our blood.

If someone has an illness, takes a drug to treat it, and afterward retains exactly the same
symptoms, why wouldn’t you assume that they have simply continued to have the same
disease? Why invent a mysterious “post-disease syndrome” to explain what is experienced by
the patient as one continuous sickness? Specialists live in silos and this should remind one of
the parable of the 5 blind men examining an elephant. Infectious disease doctors are very
uncomfortable with the idea that microbes can cause neurological disease such as Alzheimer’s.
Borrelia responsible for Lyme are long-lived, immune evasive, immune modulating stealth pathogens that can produce antibiotic tolerant persister cells. Medicine has known for over 40
years that Borrelia can cause Alzheimer’s thanks to the work of Pathologist, Dr. Alan B.
MacDonald and confirmed by Miklossy in 2011, but has chosen to ignore this. Psychiatrist
Robert C. Bransfield tells his patient “of course you are sick, your brain is infected”.

Immunosuppressants are very profitable which has spawned an epidemic of immune diseases.
This industry pays for hospitals, medical research and political parties so the situation is unlikely
to improve. Private foundations are making headway but it really requires large amounts
government funding.

Medicine is authoritarian where it’s eminence over evidence. Medical doctors are dependent
on scientists and researchers until it becomes inconvenient as in the case of complex
disseminated [chronic] Lyme disease. This goes right to the top of the PHAC in Canada. The
conditions that caused the 2016 Conference to Develop a Federal Framework on Lyme Disease
such as better tests, a made-in Canada set of Lyme disease guidelines and treatments for
complex disseminated Lyme still exist. Infectious disease doctors have abandoned their
colleagues in family medicine who have to live with their patients. It’s the attitudes they teach
that are so hard to change.

The $4m arising from the conference was given to a single group [CLyDRN] without competition
composed of public health officials and employees along with status quo researchers and past
executive members of the private Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease
[AMMI] Canada who have a death grip on Lyme disease management in Canada. CLyDRN
suffers from bias and group think. One would normally look for diversity of opinions when
trying to solve a problem. In this case PHAC has prioritized the preservation of the antibiotic
supply over returning Canadians to health. It’s difficult to solve a problem that medicine won’t
admit to. In the case of Lyme, it’s the long term disability insurance industry that doesn’t want
to underwrite the costs of treatment for chronic conditions.

The Public Health Agency of Canada [PHAC] was tasked with development of determining the
costs associated with chronic disseminated Lyme in Canada and developing a made in Canada
set of Lyme disease guidelines. Instead they have chosen to drop their role of control of disease
stating that health is a provincial matter. Instead PHAC will be in charge of education and
prevention. How is it that Canadians were able to develop a vaccine for Ebola half a world
away but can’t develop tests, guidelines and treatments for Lyme in Canada. Is this diminished
role we want PHAC to play? It’s a travesty that Canadians continue to have to travel abroad to
seek treatment.

Sincerely,
Dr. Rob Murray [DDS retired]
Lunenburg, NS

References:

CHRONIC, the Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to get Healthy Again,
Steven Phillips, MD and Dana Parish, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020

Crypto-infections: Denial, censorship and repression – the truth about what lies behind chronic
disease, Christian Perronne, 2021 Hammersmith Health Books

Amy D. Proal, PhD, [Microbiologist breaking through silo walls] PolyBio Research Foundation, YouTube Channel and papers.