gfields said...
I just read this "case study" on the CDC website. It seems extremely biased, and they reluctantly admit that people experienced a lessening of their chronic fatigue on the abx:
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/treatment/prolonged/index.html
It seems pretty clear that they reached the conclusion that long term abx treatment for Lyme is not something they were going to recommend, before they even underwent their "case study".
This false presentation of intent is VERY common in many aspects of government and medical authority and has proliferated the "science" industry as well, particularly Big Pharma. It's the primary reason for these quotes:
Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell states “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of clinical research published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (and btw, anyone with kids taking Rx should read this article) /wthicalnag.org/2009/11/09/nejm-editor/Arnold Relman, Harvard Professor and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, put it perfectly when he said, “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. . . . The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1126053/#ref15As the Lyme industry has done very successfully, you simply set up a study in a way that almost ensures a particular outcome, you call it "science", and then utilize that study as precedent for more studies, funding, disinformation campaigns, establishment of protocol and governance and even legislation. This strategy has been very influential in producing the Lyme epidemic we now see today with undrreporting, poor testing, poor diagnostics, poor treatment, poor funding, poor research... poor everything.
gfields said...
In it they say "Unvalidated test methods (such as urine antigen tests or blood microscopy for Borrelia species) should not be used."
I love how they give no reasoning why blood microscopy should not be used. I mean, that is how we Burgdorferi identified the lyme spirochete in the first place.
CDC also doesn't like IGeneX because of the band 31 & 34 DNA proteins used for vaccine schemes. It's outlawed in NY state.
This is my understanding for why the CDC/IDSA encourage ONLY their testing protocols:
Financial conflicts of interestFirst, there are several current and past members of CDC, NIH, IDSA and others in leadership positions of all things Lyme who own patents on DNA components of Bb, which are used in research and development of diagnostic tools and vaccines from which they stand to profit. These financial conflicts of interest are VERY clear and publicly recognized- initially disclosed back in 2005 with the FOIA information obtained by Kris Newby (one of the Under Our Skin producers). These disclosures were also included in Blumenthal's during his anti-trust hearings in 2006. Unfortunately, they are not all that uncommon in the health care industry.
An entire system created around bad scienceI marvel at the brazenness of the "pseudo-science" claims of ILADS and LLMDs practicing against the IDSA dogma. When in reality, the entire foundation of the CDC and IDSA version of Lyme has been carefully choreographed for a specific outcome.
The narrow definition of Lyme developed in early Lyme research and science underpins all of the current CDC and IDSA "structure" of Lyme education, diagnostics, treatment and of course vaccines. In other words, the way in which the early science was streamlined to include ONLY a very narrow interpretation of what qualifies as Lyme or Bb, (identified by the CDC surveillance criteria and EM bullseye rash, arthritic joint swelling and Lyme carditis) then, in turn, controls all the outcomes of that research - all the subsequent components of the Lyme condition.
It is this early definition that excludes MOST manifestations of the Bb microbe that has created the "controversy" affecting all of us today.
Most all other manifestations of the Bb into symptoms is ignored/discarded/discounted - they don't "fit" this version of Lyme. You narrowly define what qualifies as Lyme, the symptoms that qualify the presence of the disease and therefore qualifies trial subjects for testing and guidelines and vaccines studies... then you can narrowly define the outcomes. You narrowly define the outcomes, you can then narrowly define the interpretations of these outcomes into easily controlled conclusions.
This is otherwise known as fudged science.
In the CDC and IDSA version of Lyme, all of the current testing and guidelines and vaccines are based on this early science. And this fuels the subsequent research that is done simply to confirm what was already established. It's not hard to see how the long-term abx studies were set up to fail.
CDC surveillance dataAnother key component of this is the CDC surveillance data process. The CDC isn't really a medical governance body - it's primary purpose is to track the spread of disease. Its ENTIRE Lyme reporting process (including the testing we use) is designed specifically for this purpose---NOT for diagnosing Lyme.
- So, all of the confirming diagnostics that have been developed - the two-tiered testing protocol with the ELISA and Western Blot tests, the required minimum reactions to specific band criteria and IgM vs IgG requirements, and the manner in which labs interpret these results and produce reports for MDs, and the protocol that MDs most follow to report positive tests to County Health Depts., and in turn the process by which they are to report positives to the CDC, etc.... ALL of this is designed to serve the CDC's surveillance or tracking process.
- The CDC makes that disclaimer on their website (and some labs in some states have placed a disclaimer on lab results) recommending that MDs not use the tests alone to diagnose Lyme - but most MDs don't know, understand or follow this recommendation and most couldn't clinically dx if their lives depended on it.Some people on this forum have even reported that their MDs dismissed the disclaimer on the labs and declared definitively that they couldn't possibly have Lyme - having nothing but a negative WB.
Biowarfare weaponrySeveral infectious diseases including Lyme have been developed by the military as part of their long-standing bioengineering research. Elena Cook and others have done some outstanding research on this. It's very difficult to do trails on large groups of people (CDC's Tuskogee syphilus experiment); it's not uncommon for this process to go underground. The military and .gov will claim a study or a program has been discontinued yet evidence shows up decades later that nothing was discontinued at all - it just went covert and they stopped allowing the public any knowledge.
Even the FOIA documents were mostly redacted by the CDC--there are more loopholes and exceptions for what is required to be disclosed than there are reasons forcing them to disclose information. FOIA requirements were modified back in the 80s to allow all of the exceptions that prevent the public from really learning anything about
the truth. Nearly everything is classified as "state security" these days... when it has nothing to do with it other than those controlling DC's desire to maintain control.
As with the cancer industry and the HIV industry and the conversion of our health "care" industry from prevention toward palliative care, there is no motivation to fix the problem when the problem itself is the profit basis for the entire health care industry, and by necessity, wall street and entire financial markets. Or basically, everything else that guides modern society.
Lyme isn't a profit industry... so the only other possible explanation for 40 years of disinformation, collusion, corruption, etc... has to be a deeper and higher purpose the Lyme epidemic serves.
-p