Under Our Skin Page #10

who are willing to help you

and are legitimate doctors

willing to put their license,

their life, on the line to help you,

and that it even has

to come to that, is scary.

Dr. Burrascano,

good luck in whatever you do.

You're a wonderful doctor.

Well, recently,

I decided to close my practice.

The political climate

for physicians treating Lyme

is very difficult nowadays.

This is a doctor who was hauled before

the New York's medical review board,

I think on two occasions,

and threatened

with removal of his license.

You know, I look at these charts

and I think of the people

who've gone blind.

They've lost their hearing.

They are in wheelchairs.

I mean, it's terrible,

and especially because so many of them,

it could have been prevented

if they were properly treated

in the beginning.

That's what kills me.

Man, such a waste.

Look at all this.

Such a waste of people's lives,

of money, resources, time,

and all it takes is knowledge.

I bet you that if these people,

all of them,

had seen a Lyme-literate doctor

in the very beginning of their illness,

I'm sure more than 1/2,

if not more than 3/4 of them,

would never have gotten

to that stage ever.

Lyme can go in so many directions.

There's the people

that are hit really hard

that are actually crippled

and handicapped.

They're very visibly ill.

And then there's people like myself

that, you know, are invisibly ill,

like the walking dead.

Now there is a possibility

of getting my body back.

I'm feeling the best I've felt,

probably, in years.

I feel like my brain is back.

I have more energy.

You know, I feel much clearer.

This is the first bit of hope I've had...

real hope, in... for this whole time.

It's almost like

I started building a bridge

to the other side,

and I kind of was going that way.

Now I'm looking back like,

"I'm gonna go walk back

into my body and start again."

It's daunting.

I met a lovely gentleman

who's been really supportive,

and... I don't know.

For the first time, it just...

It feels so good

to have someone's support.

I don't have to go it alone anymore.

I can't tell you how excited I am.

This is just a marvelous,

marvelous new concept.

Up until this point, we had a hunch

that the bug had to be

hiding somewhere in the body

in a form which we couldn't really

put our fingers on

and we couldn't really find

with a microscope.

One night, as I was looking

at a culture of Borrelia,

I saw a large colony of organisms

protected by a gel-like substance,

and as I was reviewing the pictures,

it became clear

that this was very reminiscent

of what they call a biofilm.

The idea of a Borrelia biofilm

is very, very powerful,

because biofilm explains in that one word

why some cases

of Lyme disease are chronic,

why they're hard to treat,

and why, after antibiotic treatment,

they may relapse,

because biofilms are, by definition,

chronic, difficult to treat,

and capable of relapse.

It's absolutely revolutionary.

The major medical journals have published

that chronic Lyme disease is not real

and it's a psychosomatic condition.

The biofilm model dismantles

that entire argument.

The patients were right all along.

It's a great opportunity to say,

"Aha, they were right,"

and they were right.

They were right.

Wait up.

This disease nearly destroyed my life.

It got really bad.

It got really bad.

I'm happy to have my family still.

I'm thankful to them for staying with me.

I'm back.

I'm glad to be here.

If I'd stopped treatment

after even the first year,

I never would have made it

anywhere close to where I am now.

Mind you, I had to fight for what I got.

In the current system,

I'd get maybe

a month of treatment, that's it.

Everything you have

is what you're going to have

for the rest of your life,

and yet all the improvement

that I've experienced

happens after the third year

of treatment.

And then there's the phase where

I start to get my life back,

and that's the phase I'm in now,

and it's like magic.

I'm so glad to be here.

I can't even say.

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