Book Review: “Cure Unknown – Inside the Lyme Epidemic” by Pamela Weintraub
This book is a masterpiece that not only unravels the confusing history of the raging medical debate about chronic Lyme disease, but successfully tracks ongoing research to better understand the disease and ultimately find a cure.
If you suffer with Lyme disease, be prepared for a very frustrating project as you try to follow the chapters that jump from story, to story, to interview and back again. Important dates are hard to remember and research chapters packed so full of critical facts that you will need a highlighter and notepad to digest all the information.
I found it extremely difficult to read not only because of the format but also because of the information. No matter how many times I re-read a chapter, for the most part I couldn’t help but want each to end differently, like watching “Gone With The Wind” and hoping Rhett won’t walk away at the end.
The current situation and meticulously documented facts are frustrating indeed, however, your determination to read the entire book will be rewarded as mine was, with the precious gift of understanding.
We who have Lyme disease are the victims. We suffer daily with the tragedy of how Lyme disease is treated by mainstream medicine. We suffer the humiliation of being told a disease doesn’t exist in spite of the fact that it is medically proven with reams of documentation from top scientists. We suffer with the unbearable financial burden. We suffer the loss of friends. We suffer the loss of our lives (as we knew them), and unfortunately our story can’t be re-written.
We are suspended in the fog of our disease along with the bigger fog of medical deception while doctors under-treat if they treat at all, and certain highly placed medical doctors “fix” tests to prove their theories instead of searching for solutions.
This state of affairs would be dreadful with any disease but for the raging epidemic that faces our nation today with Lyme disease, it is a crime beyond belief.
And yet the author does provide hope.
There is hope for a political change with Connecticut’s Attorney General investigating the conflict of interest for the authors of the current IDSA’s guidelines (Infectious Disease Society of America) for diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease.
There is also hope for the medical community to redeem itself with the advent of new technologies and technicians.
For instance, a new team of top researchers currently gather under the leadership of infectious disease specialist Dr. Benjamin Luft (Stony Brook University) to methodically sequence every gene in every strain of B. burgdorferi which will allow diagnosticians to test for over 1800 possible proteins instead of the ten limited proteins as is now done with the western blot.
The Luft team is also testing a new antibiotic “Tigecycline” which kills spirochetes fast, possibly eliminating the need for such long courses of antibiotics.
An exciting hope for a new vaccine is being developed by Eugene Davidson, a molecular biologist who has shattered spirochetes using ultrasound and begun trials injecting the tiny pieces (non-infectious on their own) into laboratory animals, and thus far producing total immunity.
I plan to follow these developments very closely on this blog and desperately hope that meaningful answers will come before it is too late for me and others like me. Smiling at my grandson, I am confident that they will come in time to protect him.
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November 4th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
[...] to interviews with Pamela Weintraub (see Unknown Cure - Inside the Lyme Epidemic), Dr. Philipp has made great progress on proving his theory that Lyme infection inflames the brain [...]