I submit herewith a letter that I have sent to the "State" Newspaper here in South Carolina. It was in response to an article printed on the front page of the Sunday November 7 issue. In my view that article was a profoundly negative event as far a the lyme community in South Carolina was concerned. It is to be found at: http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/10120042.htm When you read it it will understand my response:

November 16, 2004
Dear Mr. LeBlanc,
I have read with shock and dismay the reports of the two patients who died while under the care and treatment of Dr. James Shortt. I would not make any comment on any aspect of the situation as it has come out in the pages of your newspaper except for the fact that I myself suffer from late stage lyme disease or tertiary borreliosis, if you will. I feel that certain comments made in your article justify clarification.

Lyme disease is an horrendous illness. The suffering it causes can be enormous. It can attack the heart, brain, neurological system, connective tissue, joints, muscles and just about any other part of the body. A hideously painful illness, it can disable and even kill. It is a bizarre, Rube Goldberg kind of disease, something straight out of science fiction. A literary genius in his wildest imagination could hardly have concocted such a disease. It does not behave like other 'normal' or common bacterial infections. It is precisely for this reason that medical science has had such a hard time understanding, diagnosing and treating it. A leading medical authority on the disease has told me that we are decades away from a complete understanding of this disease.

I note that in your article you referred to the Center for Disease Control. As you must understand that agency does not treat disease. It monitors and tracks diseases. It has made clear that the criteria that it uses for those purposes are not to be used in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of disease. Yet that is precisely what many doctors are doing. The CDC has asserted that Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis where serological tests can assist a physician in making a correct diagnosis. But these tests are often unreliable and should not be the sole basis of that diagnosis. Rather, a clinical diagnosis is based upon history, clinical symptoms, and response to therapy.

You stated that Dr. Short had made the false assertion that the patients cited in your article had Lyme disease. You stated that neither the patient nor his wife ever had any memory of a tick bite. I understand that Dr. Short sent samples of blood to be tested to an out of state laboratory. I would note that there are only a few laboratories in the country specializing in the testing of blood for tick borne diseases. All of these are located out of state.

The area in which these patients live, in northeast Richland County, has been an area where there have been a number of cases of lyme disease. The tick itself is so small that quite often people do not even know that they have been bitten. The classic sign of the disease, the bull's eye rash, appears in only 50% of the cases or less. Further the patient's wife, I understand, exhibited symptoms of severe fatigue, a common symptom of Lyme disease.

What most people, including those in the medical profession, do not understand is that there is a body of evidence that Lyme disease may be transmitted by any number of biting, blood sucking insects, not just deer ticks. I myself was probably infected by the bites of horse or deer flies. Further, as the epidemic expands there has been a great deal of discussion in the lyme community about the issue of sexual transmission of the disease. There are health care professionals who have treated married couples who are convinced that it indeed can be sexually transmitted. It is known that the spirochete that causes the disease can be transmitted from a mother to her unborn child or from a mother to her child in nursing that child.

Unfortunately the serological test results for Lyme disease are inconsistent and unreliable. There are only a few laboratories in the country with established reputations that specialize in testing for this disease. The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, Borellia burgdorferi, is a genius at evading the human immune system. It is a spirochete, a corkscrew shaped organism from the same family of bacteria as Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis and Treponema pertenue, which causes yaws. It can lie dormant for months and years until the 'coast is clear' and then return to its spirochete form and resume its attack on the body of its host.

It uses the immune reaction of the body in a kind of immunological judo to undermine the defense mechanism of its host. The pathogen is able to modulate the immune system to attack the host's body through inflammation, while at the same time suppressing the body's defense against the etiologic agent.

Under these conditions antibodies of the disease often may not be found in patients tested for the presence of B. burgdorferi. In fact those patients that have the highest bacterial load and are therefore the most seriously ill may be the very ones to show the least antibody response in testing.

Recent studies show that B. burgdorferi alters its appearance in the host's body once it encounters pressure from the immune system. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a patient mentioned in your article had a negative test result.

Thus to assert that Dr. Short made a false assertion that the patients cited in your article had Lyme disease is not supported by those facts reported in your article. Further there have been reports of certain herbal medications mentioned in your article, which Dr. Short used that people have found beneficial in treating this disease. Lyme disease is itself a difficult and complex subject which does not easily lend itself to clear-cut answers.

Sadly, the whole issue has become embroiled in politics. The understanding of established medical practice of this disease is at least ten to twenty years out of date. Many medical practitioners insist that there is no such thing as late stage lyme disease or that it is easily curable with a short treatment of antibiotics. These positions fly in the face of a large and growing body of evidence clearly to the contrary.

One hears repeatedly that there is little or no Lyme disease in South Carolina. Yet there are more and more reports of cases of this disease. In the year 2002 there was an increase of forty percent in the number of cases of this disease nationally. At that rate the number of cases is almost doubling every two years. From 1996 to 2000 the number of cases of Lyme disease reported from hospitals in South Carolina more than doubled. The CDC itself states that the cases it reports represent something in the range of ten percent of the actual cases. These facts in light of the growing body of anecdotal reports would indicate that there is a growing and increasingly serious problem here in South Carolina.

The medical profession here is in a state of denial. It has buried its head in the sand and refused to respond to the needs of a growing number of very sick people. Many people have to go out of state to get the treatment that they cannot get here. There are even reports of abusive situations. Thus people turn to doctors whom they hope can be of help to them. They turn to alternative forms of treatment because conventional medicine can or will do nothing for them. In a great many cases in late stage Lyme disease standard antibiotic therapies do not work.

The blunt truth is that we are at some point in an epidemic here in South Carolina. The members of the medical profession here have a moral obligation and professional duty to face the facts of the present situation and provide medical care to those suffering from this disease. They must do so on the basis of science and human compassion. The people who are sick and are suffering so greatly from this terrible disease deserve nothing less.

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Parkman
4409 B Trenholm Road
Columbia, SC 29206
[email protected]

Well done Thomas! You have stated it beautifully for all of us, and the many misconceptions!

You may stick my name on it if you wish. What are these people going to do, rob me of my poverty? Well I have given instructions that my ashes are to be divided into equal proportions and mailed to all the doctors and whatever. Since they have gotten everything else they would seem to have best title to the little that is left. I can honestly say that I look forward to slowly cooking Boris and Myrtle in their own juices. ICHT carried to its ultimate conclusion.

As for the rest, what could they do to me. After my latest bouts of torture and humiliation not too much could embarass me more. As Nietzsche once said the only thing that prevents a man from thinking that he is a god is the fact that he has a belly. I will not comment further-I have just been the hearer in the monologue or meditation of a fellow lyme sufferer on the quality of wind ,as the British so politely put it, and lyme disease and the question of whether this or that potion affects such. The humiliations of the animal part of our nature certainly harden one to being able to put up with anything.

Really excellent.

Printing out like crazy for posterity if nothing else.

Whatever Boris and Myrtle have done to you: they haven't stolen you brain - that's for sure.

Wish I had your gift for writing.

Congratulations for this excellent letter.

I am printing enough to give to all my friends and family. Also will try to run it in my local paper and see what happens. Thanks so much for having the brains to write such a great letter.

Blessings on you! Mule