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."
I'd mod you up if I had poist (Score:3, Interesting)
ObPKD (Score:1, Interesting)
Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house. He read about many different kinds and finally noticed bugs outdoors, so he concluded they were aphids. After that decision came to his mind it never changed, no matter what other people told him
They said that to him because the endless biting of the bugs kept him in torment. At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard. First he sprayed the house, then himself. The Yard Guard seemed to work the best.
As to the theoretical side, he perceived three stages in the cycle of the bugs. First, they were carried to him to contaminate him by what he called Carrier-people, which were people who didn't understand their role in distributing the bugs. During that stage the bugs had no jaws or mandibles (he learned that word during his weeks of scholarly research, an unusually bookish occupation for a guy who worked at the Handy Brake and Tire place relining people's brake drums). The Carrier-people therefore felt nothing. He used to sit in the far corner of his living room watching different Carrier-people enter -- most of them people he'd known for a while, but some new to him -- covered with the aphids in this particular nonbiting stage. He'd sort of smile to himself, because he knew that the person was being used by the bugs and wasn't hip to it.
"What are you grinning about, Jerry?" they'd say.
He'd just smile.
In the next stage the bugs grew wings or something, but they really weren't precisely wings; anyhow, they were appendages of a functional sort permitting them to swarm, which was how they migrated and spread -- especially to him. At that point the air was full of them; it made his living room, his whole house, cloudy. During this stage he tried not to inhale them.
Most of all he felt sorry for his dog, because he could see the bugs landing on and settling all over him, and probably getting into the dog's lungs, as they were in his own. Probably -- at least so his empathic ability told him -- the dog was suffering as much as he was. Should he give the dog away for the dog's own comfort? No, he decided: the dog was now, inadvertently, infected, and would carry the bugs with him everywhere.
Sometimes he stood in the shower with the dog, trying to wash the dog clean too. He had no more success with him than he did with himself. It hurt to feel the dog suffer; he never stopped trying to help him. In some respect this was the worst part, the suffering of the animal, who could not complain.
"What the fuck are you doing there all day in the shower with the goddamn dog?" his buddy Charles Freck asked one time, coming in during this.
Jerry said, "I got to get the aphids off him." He brought Max, the dog, out of the shower and began drying him. Charles Freck watched, mystified, as Jerry rubbed baby oil and talc into the dog's fur. All over the house, cans of insect spray, bottles of talc, and baby oil and skin conditioners were piled and tossed, most of them empty; he used many cans a day now.
"I don't see any aphids," Charles said. "What's an aphid?"
"It eventually kills you," Jerry said. "That's what an aphid is. They're in my hair and my skin and my lungs, and the goddamn pain is unbearable -- I'm going to have to go to the hospital."
"How come I can't see them?"
Jerry put down the dog, which was wrapped in a towel,
These people are in need of attention (Score:3, Interesting)
The healthcare professionals (Doctors/etc) should really not be turning these people away quite so easily imho. Yep we have a lot of 'crazy people' out there but it probably doesn't help having them sit in the corner of their houses spraying themselves with Raid/Baygon.
Re:...or not (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also in the opening chapter of A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.
Re:Don't panic (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:...or not (Score:5, Interesting)
/. morons - It could be a actual condition (Score:3, Interesting)
before calling the CDC... (Score:5, Interesting)
Particularly Disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, there's a suspicious connection reported on multiple web sites about people with this disease being co-diagnosed with Lyme disease. While this "Morgellons" parasite-disease may be a delusion, it probably has a neurologic, organic cause, due to suddenness of onset and other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if the cause turned out to be Lyme disease, which can have a wide range of neuropsychiatric effects including delusions, hallucinations, memory problems, suicidal and homicidal ideation, thought disorder, and severe cognitive deficits . One quote from TFA is quite telling:
. The fact that it may respond to antibiotics may indicate some relation to a bacterial illness, in particular Lyme. It's truly an insidious disease that can go undetected and undiagnosed for many years while patients' lives deteriorate - and no doctors are literate enough in the treatment of this disease to treat it adequately.
In any case, the medical establishment is often too quick to diagnose a patient with a complaint it does not understand as a primary-onset psychiatric disorder. By doing this, they cause a great deal of harm by delaying treatment in the case that the disease is *not* a psychiatric disorder. In order for medicine to be able to heal people, it needs to stop this trend and start taking earnest, persistent reports of people's pain seriously - even if it is delusional. If all of the possible organic causes have been researched and exhausted, only then is it time to take out the prescription pad for anti-psychotic or other psychiatric medication.
Mental Illness is a Real Illness (Score:4, Interesting)
In the issue at hand, there may be a common, tangible factor causing the numerous instances of Morgellon's Syndrome. Given the horrendous amount of chemicals that accumulate in non-organic foods, would anyone be surprised that these chemicals may be affecting the operation of the human brain?
Has anyone done an analysis of the types of food that victims (of Morgellon's Syndrome) eat? Is there a pattern?
Schizophrenia is a serious disease (Score:1, Interesting)
Thread Started on May 17, 2006, 3:33am [Quote]
Hi guys
My girlfriend wanted to show off her new car so (as always) insisted I go with her and get out of this house. The car is too bitchin.........a convertible with an amazing sound system. Even though I tried to tell her (and other friends) how I won't feel comfortable in her brand new car because I'm afraid of contaminating it....they always tell me to stop worrying about it. If they don't have it by now, they must be immune to it. There are too many times they don't want to hear it and won't let me use it as an excuse not to go somewhere. This disease hurts in more ways than one. We put some good tunes in the cd and headed off for town.
I' m 52 yrs. old, but I doubt I'll ever grow up and out of doing stupid kid stuff sometimes. Before we got into the city, we were pushing 90mph (therefore doing stupid kid stuff was already on the menu), so I stood up in my seat, stretched out my arms and started singin' some stupid song about flying. I'd pretty much forgotten how good it feels to feel that free. I love anything anyway, when it gives you the feeling that you're flying... I've always wanted to be able to! It took my mind off of all of this sh*t we're living in too.. for awhile anyway.
We got into town and she talked another good friend of mine into going for a spin. This time, I let him ride up front and I got in the back seat. It was alot more windy back there than it was up front! We head out towards the country and (duh), I decided I might as well stand up from the back seat too, since it made me feel like a kid on the first run. But this time it was more like being in a tornado. Soon after, I started feeling like my hair was being tied in knots with live electrical wires. I didn't want to say anything so I just stayed low to lessen the wind as much as I could.
By the time we got back to Mike's house, I was feeling very strange. I got out of the car and all of a sudden I felt like I was gonna pass out. I got my wit's about me, but then I started having the most frightening sensations in my head.
I got inside and went into the bathroom. When I looked at my reflection in the mirror, I pretty much went into a state of shock (no pun intended). I felt like I was on an island...totally and completely alone and I couldn't do anything but stand there, frozen. I could actually see what was taking place UNDERNEATH my scalp! I don't ever remember being so petrified and I felt like the inside of my head was being electrocuted.
What happened will be difficult to put into words..but I'll try the best I can.
I'll use the words "masses" and "wires", to make it easier (I hope) to understand how I felt. Just try to imagine...
Inside of my head closer to my brain than to my scalp, located on top and above my ears on each side, it feels like 4 or more masses crackling with electrical energy. "Wires" with the same electro magnetic properties feel like they're weaving in and out of each mass. The wires begin to crawl around inside of my head. There's an enormous amount of static and the top of my head is crackling. These "wires" seem frantic and confused, like they need some sort of guidance. All of a sudden, each individual mass from inside of my head begins pushing up from underneath my scalp with an incredible and frightening force. There is so much force coming from each individual mass as they push, that I can actually SEE each one move my scalp up and down! The static and the crackling is even more extreme than earlier. I got so pale as I stood there holding on to the sink. I couldn't believe what I was seeing...and I was terrified from what I was feeling. I thought it was gonna kill me. The episode lasted about 1/2 hour. I still can't believe this happened.
A bit later my girlfriend took me back to my house, but on my way home I stopped and bought a can of "Static Guard" (stuff you spray on clothes to reduce static electricity). I sprayed myself head to toe with it and
Re:...or not (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:...or not (Score:5, Interesting)
It reeks to high heaven of marketing hoopla.
Re:Where's the story? (Score:2, Interesting)
Really, I believe that too many of the cures of old are considered considered as folk medicine today and discounted without further trial. If you can't get it via Rx, then it isn't valid. Bullspit! Sure no story in homebrewed solutions.
Who knows (Score:3, Interesting)
. As for the mental part of the disease, it seems that humans over the thousands and thousands of years have developed a basic disgust and revulsion to small crawling things on the skin -- spiders, lice, bed bugs, centipedes, worms, scorpions and so on. There is a good reason for that, those things are associated with disease, poison bites, and un-cleanliness. On average, people would probably be less afraid of a wolf than of one of those creepy-crawly things. That is why it is not surprise that a good percentage of these cases are mental.
Mind you doctors still don't know that much about the human skin. There is no cure for rosacea -- some think it is the demodex mite that causes it, some think it is a bacterial infection, some suspect it is just genetic. Some antibiotics have been shown to work, sometimes lasers help too, but nothing definite. A lot of guess work. Doctors are not gods, they only know what other doctors may have published in a journal or by doing research themselves (rarely happens). So just because they haven't been able to find anything doesn't mean it is not there.
Better safe than sorry... (Score:3, Interesting)
But rather than freakin' dismissing everything as paranoia, wouldn't it be a good idea to actually *investigate* this? The article, along with a writeup in the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology [morgellons.org] bring a very important point. When diagnosing something as psychosomatic, make sure that the pyschological symptoms are the primary cause of what's going on, not secondary in nature or being caused by something else.
See also an interesting study from the Oklahoma Dept. of Health [headlice.org] I found with 2 minutes of Googling.
Is it a bioengineered weapon from evil crazed oil companies? No. But whatever the underlying medical cause(s) of some of this is, it deserves a legitimate medical investigation. Isn't that what science is about?
Re:Don't panic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How to get attention; (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a rare medical condition (type of intersex condition). Visably androgynous patients tend to get treated pretty poorly by the medical profession (mostly due to anti-gay prejudice.) Although gay or HIV+ patients can usually find a doctor, even "gay-friendly" doctors don't want to deal with intersex patients.
The problem is 1) Most doctors don't want to deal with patients with rare conditions because they take up a lot of time, taking time away from other patients, 2) Doctors don't want to order lab tests, MRIs, etc for rare conditions because they fear insurance companies will deny it, 3) When they do order tests, they try to come up with a very vague diagnosis to see if they can sneak it by the insurance, and 4) Doctors never want to make a written statement that "Patient X has a rare disease" because they might have to defend it later.
So since you have no written diagnosis, and no evidence, no researcher will pay attention to you.
Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of these things _really_ sound like a bad acid trip to me. I'm not kidding---what if these people do have some bizarre infectious agent that causes rashes and secretes hallucinogenic agents into the bloodstream, making the rashes appear to be outlandish and twirl out of the skin and dance around inside your arms?
Hallucinogens as potent as LSD-25 are extremely difficult to detect. If this is a new, unusual, and very strong hallucinogen (perhaps one that doesn't cause the notorious pupil dilatation that would normally be a tip-off of a chemically-altered mental state) secreted by an infectious agent, it would all add up, at least in my eyes.
Has this possibility even been investigated? It would also be consistent with the disease being treatable with BOTH anti-infectious and anti-psychotic methods.
Of course, this doesn't entirely explain the pictures on the MRF website... but perhaps some of the things being labelled as Morgellons don't involve the same infectious agent at all.
Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got to disagree with you there. Homeopaths do a much more creative and fascinating job of providing sugar pills and distilled water. Homeopathic websites have provided me with hours of entertainment. I guess in truth it should upset me, but I don't really get emotionally envolved until they start applying their nonsense to veterinary medicine. That makes me go ballistic. Poor little guys have no way to say no.
A few obvious issues... what a troll (Score:3, Interesting)
The woman in the article mentioned she saw spaghetti-like things crawling out of her son's chest. She pulled, but "couldn't pull it out." That is a very convenient excuse for not being able to produce a sample. Has this woman never heard of scissors, or are these things as tough as steel too?
Parisitologists and infectious disease researchers LIVE to discover new interesting afflictions. Believe me, if we had a new genuine disease causing spectacularly impressive crap to crawl out of victims skin, there would be journal articles about it in a minute. Also, wouldn't such obvious symptoms make it pretty damn easy to diagnose?
Lyme disease, yeah, that was a toughie to initially diagnose because the symptoms are so varied and suble. But fiber-like-stuff crawling out of people is pretty unambiguous.
And, "black flecks coming from pimples"? Err... sounds like blackheads to me.
That website is pathetic. Several pages of pictures, most of which look like shredded yarn scraps. It would have been a lot more convincing if there were pictures of the yarn crap actually coming from people. We do have some blurry shots of skin-like-substance with something on them, but nothing in particular to identify. Have these folks ever heard of "macro" mode?
I have heard of nasty parasitical infections indeed causing a crawling sensation inside the skin, and likewise inexperienced doctors thinking it is psychosomatic. However, in none of those cases was the diagnosis difficult once the actual worm/bug was dug out of the skin.
Either this "syndrome" was concocted by a complete nutjob, or this is the job of some "performance artist" trying to get an articles written up in various places.
SirWired
Re:Don't panic (Score:2, Interesting)
Now then, who develops the treatments? For the most part, drug companies do. They are also not evil people, but they ARE in it for the money because they have to be. They target chronic diseases where people will be treated for a long time, and acute diseases where they will make a lot of money. If during their research they discovered that say "Motion sickness pills cured migraines", the results would be completly ignored because there was no money to be made.
There are however other groups that do research into diseases. Academic and government labs. Many orphan diseases are researched by these groups and treatments have certainly come out from them.
Now whose fault is it that an easy cure is available that you know about, and it is not being used?
Its YOUR FAULT!
If you know how to cure a disease in a simple manner, dont just sit on your butt and bitch about the establishment. Make contacts with non-profit organizations in that area. Get them to give money to a lab that is qualified to test your treatment. Get them to publish the results. Until that time, no one will take it seriously. Science and medicine are full of stuborn people, but they will change their mind if presented with enough evidence.
Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think there's only one symptom that sounds like a bad acid trip, and that's Formication [wikipedia.org], or delusional parasitosis. It's the feeling of bugs crawling on your skin when there's actually not any bugs crawling on your skin.
I doubt it would be any kind of hallucinogenic drug. The main reason is that there are no other mind-altering symptoms, such as change of body perception (i.e. being a giant, having wings, etc), change of perception of time, hallucinations, other kinds of delusions, and so forth . I would be very surprised if there were some kind of chemical agent that *only* cause formication.
I actually suspect this could be a parasite. The thing about parasitic skin infections is that you actually feel like things are crawling inside your skin. The difference between delusional parasitosis and actually having parasites in your skin is that a delusional person doesn't really have parasites -- otherwise both feel that they have bugs crawling in their skin. Here in the relatively developed United States, people rarely get skin parasites, so the common perception is that the feeling of bugs on your skin is a a symptom of craziness.
The sores that open up on peoples' skin and the strands or fibers could be the method of reproduction. Similiar to how small pox spreads through the germ in small pox sores.
Re:Don't panic (Score:3, Interesting)