Under Our Skin Page #3

that's gonna be huge,

just like I had that feeling

20-some years ago with HIV.

I've been seeing people

from all over the country.

They're sick.

They've got a complex illness.

They're being ignored.

It's gonna be

an explosive area of medicine,

and we're gonna learn

a lot about chronic illness,

and I think that's gonna help health care

in general tremendously.

I have seen probably 30, maybe

more, doctors.

- 30 doctors.

- About 15 doctors.

I've spent over $100,000 out of pocket.

- $150,000.

- $75,000 to $100,000.

I was misdiagnosed for 3 years.

- 5 years.

- 14 years.

15 years.

It's hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I'm guessing that my case,

which could have been

controlled with, probably,

a single bottle of doxycycline

at the time I was bitten,

probably would have cost

something like $25 or $50 total

plus the doctor visit.

As it is, I'm guessing

that my case has now amounted

to $75,000 to $100,000.

My concern is that

the majority of the patients

that I see here in this office,

this very office,

who come to me

because they've been treated

for chronic Lyme disease,

is that they don't have any evidence

of ever having had

Lyme disease once, ever,

not now, not a year ago,

not five years ago.

They didn't have the rash.

They never had a positive blood test.

They never had anything.

You see, class,

my Lyme disease turned out to be...

psychosomatic.

No, that means she was faking it.

No, actually, it was a little of both.

I was originally told

at the very beginning

that I had a very deep

psychological problem.

They were telling me it wasn't real.

They said I needed to see a psychiatrist.

"You need

to see a psychiatrist."

He told me, "No, it's not Lyme."

You don't have the rash.

You are depressed."

"You're faking it.

You need to get mental help."

"You're a teenager.

Get up and walk."

"She doesn't want to go to school.

You know, she's just depressed."

You think you're crazy, but I'm not.

I know I'm not crazy.

This thing screws you up big time.

Tallyho.

Let the drag begin.

Well, where we are now

is a town in Cape Cod,

and Cape Cod is considered to be

endemic for Lyme disease.

I'm good.

This is a male deer tick

that we picked up

from the ground on

our very first 30-second drag.

This is a deer tick nymph.

This is the second stage.

They'll feed on a host

for five days, maybe,

and that's how Lyme disease

is transmitted,

and it just doesn't seem possible

that this poppy seed-size thing

is gonna make you bedridden,

possibly for the rest of your life.

Now we're trying for a deer tick female.

That'll complete the trinity.

And here we are.

The trinity is complete.

There are two females.

Let's call them Thelma and Louise,

and they're on the hunt.

There's another male.

There's another nymph.

We got another nymph.

So our odds of getting

Lyme disease here are going up.

Despite years of education,

the incident of Lyme disease

has been raised by 40% from last year.

It's only going up.

This is all tick habitat,

everything we're driving by here.

And Lyme is turning up in states

where it's never been known.

I mean, I grew up

in this part of the world,

and we didn't have a problem

with Lyme disease

that we know about.

I'm convinced that in the long run

that what we're gonna learn is

that we're seeing a process

of ecological change.

We're living in the largest

extinction in 65 million years

of other forms of life.

While many species are dying out,

viruses and bacteria

are finding new opportunities.

Warming climates, jet travel,

and human expansion

into wildlife habitats

are favoring diseases that jump

from animals to people,

diseases we're not prepared for.

It's possible that, years ago,

the patients were only getting

pure Lyme disease,

and this might explain

why the literature,

there's such a disparity,

where some people say, "Oh, no,

Lyme doesn't look like this."

What we're now seeing is,

these ticks are containing

multiple organisms.

They're not just containing

Borrelia burgdorferi,

the organism that causes Lyme,

but they're containing

ehrlichiosis, Babesia microti.

It's a malaria-like organism.

When you get Lyme

and ehrlichia and Babesia

and Bartonella henselae,

cat-scratch fever,

and Mycoplasma fermentans and viruses,

the immune system gets overwhelmed.

I'm not sure, years ago,

all of these co-infections

were present as they are now.

Now the patients

who are coming in to see me

are multiply co-infected.

They're much, much sicker,

and it's because

it's no longer just Lyme.

"Ticks are very sensitive to dryness.

"Their bodies desiccate easily,

and in dry weather,

"they hide deep in mossy

crevices on the barks of trees

"or in the leaf litter

or in wood rat nests.

"Damp weather, however,

makes them more active,

"and they come out and stand

around the tips in branches

"and blades of grass

by trails like hitchhikers

at a freeway on-ramp."

I want us to see clearly

how things are really going with nature.

We have not succeeded in developing

any level of independence from it,

nor, in fact, are our bodies

in any way independent of it.

We've always said,

"Well, you know, sooner or later,

"some of the damage

that we do to the Earth

can come back to people,"

but I think at some visceral level,

we've expected we could evade it,

and I think now

maybe some of that bill is coming due,

and we're beginning to see

some ecological changes

that are capable

of invading people's bodies.

A spirochete is a parasite

like a virus is a parasite.

It has to adapt

to different environments.

So you could have

a very virulent,

disease-producing organism.

You could have one that likes

to go to the joints

and doesn't want to penetrate

and cause injury in the brain.

You could have one that goes to the skin.

One of the hallmarks

of the onset of untreated Lyme

is a multisystem involvement,

different parts of the body,

things changing, moving around.

You might have a few weeks of body aches,

and then you might have

a few weeks of headaches

and a few weeks of real profound fatigue

and few weeks of confusion,

or you'll have pain in the large joints,

and then it'll switch

to the small joints,

and then, you know,

you're going to a neurologist.

Then you're going to a bone doctor.

Then you're going

to a stomach specialist.

Then you're going to a counselor,

and they get labeled as being crazy.

- Severe headaches.

- Cognitive problems.

- Fatigue, headaches.

- Cardiac arrhythmias.

It hurts on my foot.

Joint pain.

I have arthritis.

I'm tired.

I hurt.

- Involuntary movements.

- Brain fog.

I lost the use of my right arm.

- I became dyslexic.

- I had hallucinations.

- Blurred vision.

- Light sensitivity.

It's a long laundry list.

The tests for Lyme disease

were developed more than a decade ago.

They were controversial

back then, and in all this time,

no better tests have been approved

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