Parasitic Infection Flummoxes Victims and Doctors 581
Toxictoy writes "Imagine having a disease that is so controversial that doctors refuse to treat you. Individuals with this disease report disturbing crawling, stinging, and biting sensations, as well as non-healing skin lesions, which are associated with highly unusual structures. These structures can be described as fiber-like or filamentous, and are the most striking feature of this disease. In addition, patients report the presence of seed-like granules and black speck-like material associated with their skin. Sound like a bad plot for a Sci-Fi channel movie? Think again - it could be Morgellon's Syndrome."
Where's the story? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not seeing the story here, and I'm reluctant to believe there is a grand conspiracy keeping a single sample from making it to the CDC.
...or not (Score:5, Insightful)
My local hospital had a patient reporting something very similar - claimed that bugs were eating her and her son, and she was itching all over. Examination showed she did, in fact, have rashes - from direct self-inflicted skin irritation - and the 'bugs' she'd captured in a little baggy were most definitely lint.
She got told to stop scratching and put some cream on it, and she got a nice friendly psych consult.
Never, ever underestimate how many crazies there are. Just ask anyone in retail or another customer-facing industry if you don't believe me.
What the.. (Score:3, Insightful)
News? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's particularly telling that the 'big' sites that 'cover' this 'malady' don't actually show pictures of symptomatic sufferers or anything noteworthy like that. No, instead we get useless SEM photos of fibres, bits of dust and ECU shots of cat scratches.
This is science? (Score:2, Insightful)
HTH, HAND.
hoax (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
S'funny (Score:1, Insightful)
So I started drinking again, and they stopped. They don't like alcohol--figured that one out myself. Don't need no stinkin' CDC, sheeoot.
The one that really scares me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since these fibers are obviously ordinary textile fuzz and lint, that means that the poor kid's delusional mom is inflicting the condition upon him. I hope that their doctor had the sense to contact someone in Social Services.
Re:These people are in need of attention (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very difficult to properly treat someone who is delusional. In most of the US, patients cannot be forced into treatment unless they are actively suicidal or homicidal. In my experience, it's not that doctors turn them away, it's that they refuse to accept what's really going on and leave on their own.
Re:I am a dermatologist, and I see patients with t (Score:0, Insightful)
When several hundred stories start popping up at the same time, and all the patients suffer the same symptoms, at least listen and research more on the subject. You people act as if you've discovered everything already, and that anything new is instantly fake unless someone smarter than you(like scientists) verify it.
See, my problem with "doctors" is that they're book smart. New medicine and new techniques to cure diseases come from scientists. But the only way a scientist know about a disease is if a doctor tells them. Except when you have a bunch of doctors who are book smart, they instantly think anything remotely weird means the patient is crazy.
Re:A new low (Score:5, Insightful)
When Miles Lawrence sped to the hospital, he was told he had delusional parasitosis and that the weird spines were "just dirt." But over the next week his symptoms got worse. He scratched at his elbows and noticed more fibers, and little black specks. "It was like they were fighting back," he says.
It is more important to Lawrence to insist he is not delusion (or perhaps there are some other incentives, such as being special enough to be written into a Popular Mechanics article, or the attention one receives when one has a scary-sounding disease such as "Morgellons Syndrome") than to end his suffering through several apparently effective cures. Those that allow treatment see the alleviation of symptoms within weeks!
Subject probably not Real, but this is (Score:1, Insightful)
After the third or fourth hospital, they luck out with a Russian doctor who saw it before and treated them. The moral of the story is
Like all establishments, medicine is conservative (Score:1, Insightful)
For a long time, disease was regarded as a curse; people just didn't understand that a small animal called a germ could infect your body and cause illness. What a silly concept! As such, illnesses were misdiagnosed and mistreated for centuries. Then modern medicine came along, but it still wasn't aware of another class of germ, the virus (which is non-living). Eventually, knowledge of viruses became well-established and accepted. But then there was a whole new class of non-microbial, disease-causing agent that flummoxed the establishment: only recently has the existence of the prion, a hostile mal-formed protein, been acknowledged. And then there's radiation poisoning, something that wouldn't have been understood at all 150 years ago.
What if there are other undiscovered disease agents? It's immensely hubristic to assume modern medicine has everything figured out yet.
I've read about significant outbreaks of Morgellon's Syndrome in non-mainstream publications like the Fortean Times. It's serious, and whatever it is, it's not made up. That it's frequently present alongside other unusual diseases like Lyme disease doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It took researchers years to figure out that a stealthy virus called HIV was enabling other diseases to destroy people's bodies. Likewise, it'll take some clever thinking and new detection methods to figure out what's behind Morgellon's.
It's the edge cases that test the establishment. If leprosy emerged today and was more rare, chances are the medical profession would reject its existence; after all, the bacteria that causes it cannot be cultured in the lab, unlike all other known bacteria. Its mode of transmission is also a mystery; it's practically non-contagious from personal contact, and the cause of nearly all infections is unknown. The bacteria itself is also not directly responsible for the lesions and other visible symptoms.
To anyone who thinks Morgellon's must necessarily be a load of nonsense: pray that you never get infected by that "nonsense" yourself. For the people affected, it really sucks.
Re:/. morons - It could be a actual condition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
We are in the early stages of this thing being accepted as even existing, but as more people show up with it, eventually the medical establishment will more likely take it seriously, too. When AIDS first appeared, it was not accepted as a real disease either.
It's unfortunate that a key symptom of Morgellons, the 'crawling bugs' sensation, matches a key symptom of chronic methamphetamine use, but while it could be argued that the bug sensation is purely a mental and unprovable symptom, the Morgellons sufferer is not certainly not imagining the demonstrable weird hairlike protrusions from their skin. No, it's not laundry lint. Samples have been analyzed and even PCR DNA analysis done. This is a real, a weird, and most certainly a parasitic-spread, disease, and a nasty one. This is not a game.
Please resist the temptation to scoff at unfortunate suffering people. You might be one of them soon: it is possible that one way that Morgellons is spreading is in contaminated bedding in hotels and motels. The US is experiencing some pretty serious outbreaks of bedbugs in the travel industry, and if Morgellons is spread by a parasitic mite, tick, or nematode as is theorized, it can and will be distributed the same way rapidly. The many illegals employed as maids in this industry, in California for example, have no concept of prevention, and bedbugs are getting to be a real problem for travellers. Even expensive hotels in New York City have a real problem with it.
The CDC finds that the US has a large increase in drug-resistent TB and leprosy coming in from illegal workers. It is not out of the question that parasitic-vectored diseases are also coming in too. A second possibility is that Morgellons is coming into the US in imported goods, such as furniture and clothing. It is interesting that the reported cases are much more prevalent in warm southern states or California. Could it be that insects in goods die if cold, and warmth helps them? The government should allocate some money allocated to investigate this. In these global times, the US is wide open and susceptible to little-recognized things. The Asian beetle came in with pallet wood from overseas, and now is devastating American native trees.
Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati (Score:3, Insightful)
News for nerds? News for credulous nitwits these days. Somebody gave this an "insightful"?
Re:I am a dermatologist, and I see patients with t (Score:1, Insightful)
Thank the dieties I found another doctor who ran a skin allergy test and found one of the more severe cases of mite allergy to come through his office in a long while. A few months of allergy meds and environmental changes later, no rashes, no itchiness, no "mental dellusions".
Re:wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
The limited expierence I have had with hispanic workers of questionable legallity leads me to believe that they work far harder than the general population.
If someone has no concept of their job in a fairly siple procedural one like that it is the manager that is most at fault.
It kind of reminds me of the (made up) story about Sun Tzu where he is tested/dared to make soldiers out of women.
"if a general gives orders and they are not followed because they are unclear, it is the fault of the general".
Cleaning staff not cleaning do to "no concept" is a clear case of that, and the same people who will grossly take advantage of illegals to save a few dollors (minimum wage isn't much) are probably the same that would not train them to actually seperate dirty and clean and clean sheets propperly at the detriment of customers.
As for the resistant TB mentioned by GP, the real solution is to pressure Mexico into controlling Anti-biotics better so that the TB is killed, and not naturally selected to be more resistant (of course minimal free health care for our own less fortunate would probably help prevent resistant strains too).
Re:Don't panic (Score:5, Insightful)
Good points! Incredible how important the human body's largest organ is and we know so little.
Isn't leprosy still on the "uncurable" list? Is it even on the "containable"; i.e., halt it where it is, point? akin to tuberculosis. My mom got it when she was young and as a school teacher, has to get x-rays of her lungs every year to show it's still dormant.
One other area to touch on is rehashed so often you'd think people catch on: misuse of anti-bacteria related issues...yet there are a lot of peabrains running loose in an unorganized conspiracy to sink modern medicine. You'd think all of the parties involved were backwoods hillbillies with no educations, IQs smaller than their shoe size, and fewer teeth than toes.[1]
There are three guilty parties: 1) patients; 2) doctors; 3) people in general.
1. Patients are guilty because they think doctors are just quoting a pamphlet when they tell them, "take all of the pills, don't stop just because you start feeling better." And what do people do? that's a rhetorical question. Boom. Compromised antibiotic.
2a. Doctors are guilty because patients come to them when they are ill and it's a cold. The patients harangue them into giving them an antibiotic because they think it'll make them feel better, despite Dr. Quack telling them antibiotics don't work with viruses. Finally, the script pad comes out and voila! Compromised antibiotic!
2b. Doctors are also guilty because each hospital has at least one group where the medical staff and pharmacy administration interact; e.g., "P&T" (Pharmacy & Therapeutics). Issues such as what the formulary items should be, how to deal with non-formulary items, and importantly: what drugs can be administered when. It's supposed to be binding, but doctors don't work for hospitals, so they'll basically do what they want when it comes to that type of thing. The policy can be to only use some new antibiotic for specific patients or diseases|cases and doctors will be more concerned if their shoe is untied when they place the script for the brand new bug-killer and can proudly tell the patient, "We've got somoething brand new and it's going to make you feel a lot better very soon." Shazam! The beginning of the end of that antibiotic. Another compromised antibiotic.
3. Society in general and the marketing departments of various household goods: all of the various soaps & cleansers which promise to kill bugs when you use them. You're only supposed to use soap to clean your hands off - remove the stuff which doesn't belong there - remove as in get it off of your hands, not kill some of the bugs and leave a small number of immune ones in place. Eugenics takes over and we begin breeding superbugs.
[1] Wait. Isn't that a description of NASCAR fans? Sorry for the mixup.
Re:What the.. (Score:3, Insightful)
All-bold paragraphs, too many different fonts, unpleasant use of primary and secondary colours (especially in solid-colour backgrounds), and, even more than the rest, all-centred paragraphs are almost always found on the websites of conspiracy theorist, UFO nuts or new religions. Seriously, search for some conspiracy or new-age related terms on the web, and you'll see what I mean (this generally only applies to people trying to let people know what they think, not to people trying to make a profit).
Re:Don't panic (Score:3, Insightful)
[cut]
>I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself.
While I understand that being ill tend to make people nervous, don't you that you're a bit self-contradictory: it's true that we don't know much about skin illness unfortunately, so why thinking about shooting dermatologist??
They do what they can, with the little information we have, that's all.
Placing too much expectations on doctors is *your problem*.
Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the classic 'argument from ignorance'. To a some degree, you are correct- Lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack. However, this is only an argument of the possibility of something existing, not that something does actually exist. That's a pretty weak argument. It can be equally applied to almost any claim. Heck, it can be applied to Santa Claus existing.
just look at the battles the homeopathic community has to fight; some of them are wackos perhaps, but many of them have treatments superior to those of "modern" medicine.
Ah, now here you make a definitive argument: Homeopathic medicine is effective. However, you don't back it up with any evidence at all (and you've infected it with the old 'modern' medicine is ridgid strawman).
To anyone who thinks Morgellon's must necessarily be a load of nonsense
You've got it backwards. People aren't saying it "must necessarily" be nonsense. They're saying the evidence is weak, so it's not necessarily what the victims say it is. There are lots of possibilities about what is going on, from it being exactly what the victims claim to it being nothing at all, to a whole rainbow of things in between. So don't just accept it so readily. That's really showing a pretty closed mind. (And this goes for Homeopathy too, btw)
Reminds me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How to get attention; (Score:3, Insightful)
Which says about enough about them... They are quacks.
If one quack's herbs won't help they will just refer you to the next quack's accupuncture needles.
They might calll themselves 'alternative' but the correct term is 'unproven' or for most of those treatments it is just 'proven to be total bullshit'.
The only reason insurances pay for it is because enough delluded people want to pay for it.
With those people there are only two possibilities: either they know that shit isn't working but folling you anyway, or dispite their years of medical training actually think it works and thus fail to have a basic understanding off simple scientific testing.
I wouldn't want to be treated by either one.
Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness (Score:3, Insightful)
Hubris and alternative medicine (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, but it's not hubristic to assume homeopathic medicine had everything figured out 200 years ago? You don't need to know about bacteria and viruses, you don't need to know the molecular structure of proteins at all, you don't need to examine the evidence, you don't need to do any tests. Just stating that "like cures like" is enough... Talk about hubris!
If there are diseases for which we do not know the cure, the solution is not to go back to ignorance and superstition. Perhaps we do not have *the* cure for AIDS or the common cold or many types of cancer, but we do get better treatment all the time. Four years ago I had appendicitis. I was treated by laparoscopy, which was done through three small cuts in my belly, about one centimeter each. I spent two days in the hospital and have no visible scars today. How would a similar treatment be performed fifty years ago? Instead of sending a small remotely controlled equipment into the patient's body, the surgeon had to cut him up enough to get both hands inside.
There may be some very rare diseases that haven't caught the attention of modern medicine yet, but the most likely explanation for most of the patients that claim to have such a rare disease is a very common ailment: hypochondria. When I read about this so-called "Morgellon's syndrome", the symptoms seemed familiar, I have read about this before [biofact.com]. Perhaps what's missing in modern medical training is teaching all GPs to send patients who have undiagnosed diseases with symptoms like chronic muscle pain, itching, skin rashes, unusual hair loss, difficulty in concentration and memory loss, etc, to psychiatric treatment.
Re:Where's the story? (Score:3, Insightful)
H2O2 is more selective; this sounds like an excellent approach.
Re:Don't panic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the story? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ [nizkor.org]
I'd advise looking at http://www.morgellons.org/ [morgellons.org] since that site has more detail for medical professionals.
Re:wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously though, doctors are trained to help with the tools they have. They know better than you do. They went to college that long for a reason. It even says in the article that it can be treated with anti-psychotics AND anti-biotics, which leaves me to wonder if it could be treated just as well with placebo.
It was also interesting that when the doc in the article but a cast over the lesions, they healed right up! Interesting. Sounds like self-inflicted to me.
The problem here isn't the doctors, it is the cultural stigma toward needing to be treated for a psychological disorder. People don't want to do it because they don't see it as a real disease.
Re:How to get attention; (Score:1, Insightful)
I live in Rochester Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic. They have a doctor for just about everything. I could ask around to see if there is anybody here who has taken a specific interest in intersex conditions or knows of someone who does. Hopefully there is an interested doctor that has no desire to cure that which is not a complaint.
Regards,
Re:Don't panic (Score:2, Insightful)