Please share this article on facebook, etc if you can.
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- I applaud CNN for putting this on their website. Hope it also gets some air time. Hope it stays in their loop. If the air fairy Hollywood socialites' news can stay on top of news, this certainly should if importance matters.
Bet they get a lot from the regular world of medicine to pressure them to drop this. Hope to hear more from her. She is the best journalist we have to tell the truth. -
Posted by Lymetoo (Member # 743) on :
Remind me of the magazines she writes for, please??
Psychology Today and Discover magazine??
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- Psychology Today ran a series of articles by her about the psychologocial symptoms of lyme. From her blurb there, but it does not link to the PT articles:
Pamela Weintraub is the Executive Editor at Discover magazine and the author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (St. Martin's Press, 2008), first place winner of the American Medical Writer's Association book award.
Pamela Weintraub's website -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- Pulling up for newcomers: This author's detail about how different strains of lyme can result in far different patient experiences.
From my "study notes" or previous posts, starting out here in my own voice:
Now, we all know someone who seemed to do just fine with a short course of doxycycine. And, apparently, these are the ones that the IDSA doctors must limit their practices to (&/or not know that many of their patients likely go elsewhere when continuing symptoms are ignored).
The STRAIN of borrelia makes a huge difference.
Usually my note taking is better than this. The first couple sentences do not sound like how I talk. But I did not note who else may have said this. Perhaps some thoughts from other LymeNet posters to start -- clearly, where noted below with page numbers - straight from the book.
----------------------------------------
What many people don't know is that 10 strains of lyme cause only the lyme rash. They don't cause any lyme disease at all.
So, that's why a person can get a rash and just take a little doxy and be fine. They actually would have been fine even without the doxy.
On the flip side, if lyme is present just doxycycline can CAUSE lyme to become chronic as doxy pushes spirochetes to go into the cyst form.
Combination treatment - with very specific Rx to address cyst form as well, is vital to prevent that. Antibiotics do not do this.
Back to the rash but no symptoms: as mentioned above, that may be true for NOW but it can change. Still, maybe not.
Here is an exerpt from the book "Cure Unknown" by Pam Weintraub in which she talks about this aspect of lyme disease:
p. 342 tells how Ben Luft, infectious disease specialist and Daniel Dykhuizen, evolutionary biologist, working together at Stony Brook went out into the field collecting ticks and analyzing Borrelia.
A few years later, they had a graduate student travel the Eastern seaboard as far north as New Hampshire and south through the Carolinas collecting ticks infected with B. burgdorferi spirochetes.
p.343 ``The Borrelia were duly isolated and compared for differences in their genes.
Eventually the researchers focused on twenty strains, each with a different version of the changeable OspC. Working with those twenty strains, Luft learned that six didn't infect humans and ten caused only a rash.
Only four of the twenty could leave the skin to invade other tissue like the heart and joints or the brain.
The most virulent of the strains turned out to be the prototypical B31, the version of B. burgdorferi ... ultimately isolated by Burgdorfer and Barbour at the Rocky Mountain labs in 1981.
The implications are profound.
One of the most important is that if just four strains of the twenty cause disseminated infection, then the roster of rash-based studies on the treatment of early Lyme disease, conducted from the 1980s to the present, would have to be reassessed.
Take a moment to ponder the simple math: It would be impossible to accept results based on the assumption that 100 percent of Lyme rashes can cause invasive disease when a significant percent cannot.
Some of the classic studies claim very high cure rates for early infection; yet if the causative strain were of the rash-only variety, then even orange juice would be a ``cure.''
Are recommended treatment protocols truly curing most of those with early, invasive borreliosis? Or has noise from rash-only strains obscured less rosy results?'' (p. 344)
Pamela Weintraub is an author and journalist who specializes in health, biomedicine, and psychology. She is currently a consulting editor at Psychology Today and executive editor at MAMM magazine,
and has served as editor in chief of OMNI and staff writer at Discover, Weintraub has written hundreds of articles for many national publications, including Redbook, Ms., McCall's, Audubon, and Health, to name just a few. She lives in Connecticut -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- For PARENTS -
From her series at Psychology Today, another very important topic for to parents of children with lyme:
Munchausen: Unusual Suspects - by Pamela Weintraub
2007 - last reviewed on November 10, 2010
Call them the Munchausen mothers. A growing number of women stand accused of deliberately sickening their children for attention from doctors. In an era of patient advocacy and hard-charging moms, there's no end in sight to this hotly contested diagnosis.
- Full article at link. -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- I see this at CNN's site, under the OPINION section. It took a while to see that they really posted it, not a flashy placement but at least it's there, just the title, in grey.
I would like to she her interviewed in depth, along with ILADS doctors. BOOK-TV would be a great place for her to be. And Tavis Smiley, too. Charlie Rose. Frontline.
Along with representatives from all the top ILADS minded lyme advocacy and education organizations. -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- spinning122 just posted this in another thread - so adding to various links for this author above, another good one:
For patients with tick-borne diseases, the path to health can be confounding. Combining integrative and conventional approaches may be the best way forward. -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
CURE UNKNOWN - revised edition June 2013 (first edition: 2009)
The groundbreaking, award-winning investigation into Lyme disease—the science, history, medical politics, and patient experience—now with a brand new chapter. -
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- I think she has a new website but I'm out of steam. Anyone else, please free feel to post if you have that.' 0
Posted by Blymey919 (Member # 47424) on :