Under Our Skin Page #2

the bacteria will be released,

and then it just gets into the blood,

and it gets into your heart,

and then your brain,

and then you have Lyme disease.

It'd seem like for every thing

that I'd read about it

that it was harmful,

there was always something

I'd read about it that said,

"No, no, no.

It's actually

very easy to cure."

Well, when I saw this doctor,

you know, he said,

"You've got

a long road ahead of you."

I, Mandy, take you, Sean...

- To be my husband...

- To be my husband...

- To have and to hold...

- To have and to hold...

- In sickness and in health...

- In sickness and in health...

- To love and to cherish...

- To love and to cherish...

- Until death do us part.

- Until death do us part.

- It's not the pale...

- Husband and wife.

That excites me

There's no difference

in how I feel about her now

and how I felt about her then.

We'll see if he says that

when I'm starting to get treatment

and I'm all...

No

It's just the nearness of you

I think, like a lot of people

who've had Lyme disease,

I've been led to wonder

why it's not being treated

with the kind of seriousness

that it deserves.

This is not a rare disease.

It's thought of as a rare disease,

but in fact, there's nothing

controversial about the fact

that it's the most common

vector-borne disease

in America today.

It is far, far more common

and much more dangerous

to the average American

than West Nile virus is.

The Centers for Disease Control

reported over 35,000 new cases last year.

Yet because the disease

is so often overlooked,

they admit that the actual number

may be up to 12 times higher,

making Lyme disease

far more prevalent than AIDS.

In the past 15 years,

annual cases have increased fourfold,

and in the past two years alone,

cases have almost doubled.

The number of cases

of Lyme disease went way up

in this country last year,

up by 41% to be exact.

A record number of Lyme disease cases

have been reported in the state

of Maryland this year.

New cases of Lyme disease

are up 50% in Massachusetts.

The CDC admits

there are at least ten times

as many cases out there.

The entire neighborhoods

and whole families

are being debilitated

by this infectious disease.

Health officials

are now calling it an epidemic.

I think there are hundreds

of thousands of people out there

who have Lyme disease who have

no idea they have Lyme disease.

There are doctors out there

who aren't looking for it.

He just kept saying,

"You don't have Lyme."

"You don't have

Lyme disease."

"You don't have Lyme."

He told me there was no such thing

as Lyme disease in North Carolina.

"Lyme disease doesn't

really exist in Tennessee."

"You can't have Lyme disease,

because you haven't been

to these areas in Long Island

or this area in Connecticut."

I've been told it isn't Lyme

hundreds and hundreds of times.

How do you know you have it?

"Why do you say you have it?"

He slammed his fist

on the table and said,

"Don't talk to me

about Lyme anymore."

It is a national health crisis

that is completely and totally

being ignored and squashed.

What is going on?

We have a major problem

with this disease.

We have a major problem

finding out who's got it,

treating them effectively and quickly.

It's far more expensive

to treat in late stages

and less effective than it is early,

and yet we don't respond early enough

with many of the patients,

and many of them get to late stage,

and they're sick

for the rest of their lives.

Okay, quiet.

No barking.

No barking.

Okay.

- Have a good day.

- I love you, my girl.

I'll see you later.

I'm a medical doctor

with a specialty in pathology.

I'm a general pathologist,

but I'm doing molecular studies now

in connection with my 20 years

of researching Lyme disease.

The research is something that I do

after I've done my day's work,

and if I have energy left,

I work into the night,

so I do the research on my own time.

Okay, hi, Travis.

My lab assistant Travis.

This part of the cellar is mine.

The rest of the cellar

is for other things in our life,

like Christmas ornaments.

This is my microscope.

I've owned this for 20 years.

It's a research microscope.

My work is building bridges

between what I can see

under the microscope

and what is going on in the human body.

The orthodox, conventional view

is that the bacteria

that causes Lyme disease

doesn't stay around very long

inside the human body.

That will be disproven,

and we will enter an arena now

where long-term, chronic infections

will be embraced

by the medical community,

and the patient will benefit.

Alan MacDonald is doing frontier research

about the role of Lyme disease,

Borrelia infection

in neurological illnesses,

and he's doing it against

substantial resistance

in the traditional academic community.

I'm one man working alone,

and there is great skepticism

that my work has meaning,

and I'm working hard

to get some evidence to say

that there is some meaning,

and time will tell.

Two groups of doctors

are pitted against each other

over just about every aspect

of Lyme disease,

from the very definition of the illness

to how it should be treated.

At the present time,

the traditional medical community

believes that there is

basically only an acute form

of the disease that is characterized

in a sound byte as "hard to get"

and "easy to treat."

For 10 or 15 years, there's been

a second group of Lyme doctors

that say, "No, that's not true."

"Lyme disease can be

a persistent, chronic illness

with many different symptoms."

So the question that is posed

at the present time is,

"Does chronic Lyme disease

really exist?"

We are driving from Orlando up

to North Carolina.

It's a little over 500 miles,

which is the closest spot

that we have to Florida

that actually has a clue about Lyme.

My biggest fear is that treatments

would be unsuccessful.

She could continue

to have a downward spiral.

Neurologically, she could have

things that are irreversible.

Yeah.

Okay.

While we're optimistic that

Mandy will steadily improve,

I'm skeptical that it's gonna be

smooth sailing.

She's so fragile,

and her central nervous system

is so irritable.

It doesn't take a lot to set her off.

We have to figure out what's the best way

to treat you intermittently

to get you to the best place

so that your immune system

is more in charge,

so that's a tricky business.

He said, "Well, we're gonna

have to do six to eight months"

"of antibiotic therapy.

"We'll have to put a catheter in,

"you know, to your superior vena cava,

and then you're

gonna probably get worse."

So I said,

"Well, by worse, do you mean,

like, emergency room worse?"

And he said, "Yeah."

Let's just do one at a time.

Let's do this one,

and this is as needed, right?

Lorazepam, and then here,

your supplements, that's fine.

These are all fine.

What I sense is that we're

at the beginning of something

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