Re: Putting the disease in perspective
Page A3, The News, Sept. 12, 2019.
To Dr. Ryan’s credit he has expressed interest in seeing Lyme and tick-borne disease prevention introduced in the early grades in the school system.
Unfortunately this hasn’t happened, likely due to opposition from Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Officer of Health who has a long history of downplaying, trivializing the disease and recently gaining international notoriety by attacking Lyme patients in the province by re-tweeting harmful comments that they are part of a well-funded Lyme cult.
Why are patients leaving Canada to get a diagnosis and seek treatment elsewhere? Many of the problems are due to the guidelines preferred by public health officials. Guidelines are meant to help patients and assist physicians. The International Disease Society of America (IDSA) guidelines were removed from the CDC website in December of 2015 because they had grown stale. Their purpose was to harm physicians who didn’t follow the guidelines and to restrict treatment to 21–28 days using a single bacteriostatic agent no matter what the stage of the disease the patient had. It is these out-of-date, non-validated guidelines that NS Health and Wellness suggest physicians use.
The latest IDSA draft guidelines have received overwhelming disapproval from physicians and 77 Lyme groups in eight countries because they are even more restrictive and didn’t involve any Lyme patients or physicians that treat Lyme in their development. The only guidelines in North America that meet the United States Institute of Medicine GRADE level requirements are the guidelines produced by the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). Provinces should not accept anything less.
The spokesperson for N.S. Health stated they used peer-reviewed research, but failed to mention that is cherry-picked and all science that differs from accepted dogma has been ignored. Peer reviewed doesn’t mean you sit down with your buddies over a case of beer on a Friday night and agree to something.
For research and science to become evidence, it requires transparent debate with stakeholders. There is no more important stakeholder in health care than the sick patient and their experts. No such debate has been allowed in Canada. The guidelines she refers to prune the research database and cite only that which supports their pre-determined assumptions while ignoring volumes of research that show their assumptions are incorrect. This is a long-standing tactic of the private and highly industry influenced Infectious Disease Society of America and its puppet organization in Canada, the private Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease of Canada. Both of these organizations are anti-evidence, anti-science and are criticized globally by true scientists. Canadians are in real danger so long as our politicians and taxpayer-salaried pseudo-scientists are allowed to ignore the ethics of science and Canada’s commitment to the highest quality of health care.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States has downplayed the severity of Lyme disease; essentially classifying this disease as a low and non-urgent health risk. Public health agencies worldwide are blindly following what has been deceitfully established. There is a refusal to recognize that untreated/undertreated Lyme evolves into an entirely different multi-staged, multi-systemic disease similar to untreated strep throat, which progresses to rheumatic fever causing irreversible heart damage.
Lyme is the 21st Century plague that became too expensive for insurance companies to treat with unacceptable testing, inadequate treatment, lack of medical training and absolutely no disease control; a public health disaster. It is the infectious disease equivalent of cancer.
The Lyme disease disaster for Canadians is an excellent example of how the ‘self-regulating’ medical colleges and medical associations have woven themselves into the publicly funded health-care system, positioning themselves as the only experts.
The fact is that the science is woefully incomplete on pathogenic borreliosis, especially relative to morbidity and mortality, so setting diagnostic and treatment guidelines in stone at this point is anti-scientific in its very nature.
Patients and patient experts do not accept that the scientific questions have all been answered and can now be simply accepted as being absolute truths. All of us need to understand that science is rarely settled and acknowledge that science is always evolving.
Sincerely,
Rob Murray (DDS ret’d)
Lunenburg
Board member Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation [www.CanLyme.org]
