Parasitic Infection Flummoxes Victims and Doctors

Toxictoy writes "Imagine having a disease that is so controversial that doctors refuse to treat you. Individuals with this disease report disturbing crawling, stinging, and biting sensations, as well as non-healing skin lesions, which are associated with highly unusual structures. These structures can be described as fiber-like or filamentous, and are the most striking feature of this disease. In addition, patients report the presence of seed-like granules and black speck-like material associated with their skin. Sound like a bad plot for a Sci-Fi channel movie? Think again - it could be Morgellon's Syndrome."

Comments

Don't panic

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

Don't worry, I'm sure it can be cured with aromatherapy, reflexology, homeopathy and a large dose of serpentes lipids. . .

Re:Don't panic

[arivanov]

The success will be similar to what dermatology proper can achieve anyway. Modern dermatology cannot cure eczema. Most varieties of psoriasis are uncurable as well. Add in neurodermatitis and a few other skin conditions and you get a fairly long list of conditions which the doctors cannot deal with. They poke at it from different angles like tribal shamans and the success rate is about the same. The reality is that we know so little about the human skin, it is not even funny. Just take Pimecrolimus and eczema. Nobody has even the faintest idea why it works. Staph and eczema? What is the cause and what is the effect? So on so fourth. I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself.

Re:Don't panic

[AndreiK]

Reading the article, of course it can. It's the placebo effect.

Re:Don't panic

[turbosk]

"I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself."

Man, you and I are the reasons they invented restraining orders.....

Re:Don't panic

[Propaganda13]

House would have had this cleared up during one of his clinic duties. It wouldn't even warrant a full show.

Re:Don't panic

[djsmiley]

Modern dermatology cannot cure eczema.

I've cured my own eczema enough that it doesn't bother me for about 10months out of 12. How? Its a selection of things, but the worse problem for mine was when the air was humid it would go mental.

Also im alerigic to ALOT of shampoos, conditoners and clothes treatment stuff.

Problem is the world doesn't have any time on its hands to find out what causes the problems, so it never knows WHY it has this problem. If you want to stop your excema do as i did, keep an diary and think carefully of what you've eaten, done, where you have been, what your wearing, when were those clothes last washed?

I find the longer i leave my jeans unwashed, the less problems they cause me!. Why this is im not sure but it works fine, i just spray them down with some Kleezne stuff to make them smell normal (not that they need it really).
Nylon causes me no end of problems due to my skin sweating, causing it to get worse.

Dont RUB your skin dry, pat it instead or getting a toweled dressing gown and wear that and just let your body air dry, its far nicer on your skin.

Good luck!

Re:Don't panic

[70Bang]

Good points! Incredible how important the human body's largest organ is and we know so little.

Isn't leprosy still on the "uncurable" list? Is it even on the "containable"; i.e., halt it where it is, point? akin to tuberculosis. My mom got it when she was young and as a school teacher, has to get x-rays of her lungs every year to show it's still dormant.

One other area to touch on is rehashed so often you'd think people catch on: misuse of anti-bacteria related issues...yet there are a lot of peabrains running loose in an unorganized conspiracy to sink modern medicine. You'd think all of the parties involved were backwoods hillbillies with no educations, IQs smaller than their shoe size, and fewer teeth than toes.[1]
There are three guilty parties: 1) patients; 2) doctors; 3) people in general.
1. Patients are guilty because they think doctors are just quoting a pamphlet when they tell them, "take all of the pills, don't stop just because you start feeling better." And what do people do? that's a rhetorical question. Boom. Compromised antibiotic.

2a. Doctors are guilty because patients come to them when they are ill and it's a cold. The patients harangue them into giving them an antibiotic because they think it'll make them feel better, despite Dr. Quack telling them antibiotics don't work with viruses. Finally, the script pad comes out and voila! Compromised antibiotic!

2b. Doctors are also guilty because each hospital has at least one group where the medical staff and pharmacy administration interact; e.g., "P&T" (Pharmacy & Therapeutics). Issues such as what the formulary items should be, how to deal with non-formulary items, and importantly: what drugs can be administered when. It's supposed to be binding, but doctors don't work for hospitals, so they'll basically do what they want when it comes to that type of thing. The policy can be to only use some new antibiotic for specific patients or diseases|cases and doctors will be more concerned if their shoe is untied when they place the script for the brand new bug-killer and can proudly tell the patient, "We've got somoething brand new and it's going to make you feel a lot better very soon." Shazam! The beginning of the end of that antibiotic. Another compromised antibiotic.

3. Society in general and the marketing departments of various household goods: all of the various soaps & cleansers which promise to kill bugs when you use them. You're only supposed to use soap to clean your hands off - remove the stuff which doesn't belong there - remove as in get it off of your hands, not kill some of the bugs and leave a small number of immune ones in place. Eugenics takes over and we begin breeding superbugs.


[1] Wait. Isn't that a description of NASCAR fans? Sorry for the mixup.

Re:Don't panic

[Demoulous]

Sounds very similar to what I did to cure mine. Avoid all shampoos with parfum/perfume, same with soaps and the like. I use a dead sea mud soap which my skin loves and it kills my fungal psoriasis dead. I also use Pears transparent soap on my face and let myself dry in a towelled dressing gown. As a result my skin is in the best state its been in, in years. My dermatologist hadn't the time to be arsed, so I did this all myself with trial and error like the above poster.

Re:Don't panic

[renoX]

>The reality is that we know so little about the human skin, it is not even funny.
[cut]
>I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself.

While I understand that being ill tend to make people nervous, don't you that you're a bit self-contradictory: it's true that we don't know much about skin illness unfortunately, so why thinking about shooting dermatologist??
They do what they can, with the little information we have, that's all.
Placing too much expectations on doctors is *your problem*.

Re:Don't panic

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

I suffer from seborrhaic dermatitis. For years I had no success with doctors' treatments which generally had bad side effects. Then I gave up sucrose and junk food and was effectively cured. No doctor ever mentioned this and it turns out that there's a group of people on yahoo who advocate this treatment. It works pretty much 100% of the time, according to those guys. This has made me a lot more cynical about the medical profession and its relationship with business. It's in no-one's financial interest to advocate a cheap and simple cure that involves _not_ buying and consuming refined foods, except the patient - not the doctor, not the food industry, not the makers of creams etc..

Re:Don't panic

[ichigo 2.0]

Leprosy is curable with antibiotics.

Re:Don't panic

[Fred_A]

Isn't leprosy still on the "uncurable" list?

Leprosy is dead easy to cure nowadays. At the most it will take a few months of a very simple oral treatment.

The number of cases decreases roughly 20% / year.

Regarding tuberculosis, there currently are multi-drug resistant strains that are indeed problematic. As usual these arise from the poor supervision of medications at a time where the consequences weren't understood.

Apart from that I'm in full agreement with your enumeration.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

I was similarly affected for years with unexplained rashes, but I was lucky: I have a chemistry degree and I ran into a couple of good allergists while I was in the Air Force.

The doctors discovered I was allergic to propylene glycol and sulfa. Those two are in virtually every shampoo and body wash out there. Both physicians stressed that these are common allergies.

I wonder how many unexplained rashes are actually perfectly common reactions to the sulfa found in anti-bacterial products and soap. There's a *reason* the medical community doesn't prescribe sulfa drugs the way it used to--a lot of people had reactions. Propylene glycol is in everything--including topical applications of medicine and *salad dressing*. Although most people don't have a reaction, there's probably enough people out there who do, to explain rashes that don't tie themselves to a particular product--because the same chemicals are used in almost ever product for skin and hair, and just the fragrance changed.

Re:Don't panic

[Rutulian]

Everything you say is good up until here.

3. Society in general and the marketing departments of various household goods: all of the various soaps & cleansers which promise to kill bugs when you use them. You're only supposed to use soap to clean your hands off - remove the stuff which doesn't belong there - remove as in get it off of your hands, not kill some of the bugs and leave a small number of immune ones in place. Eugenics takes over and we begin breeding superbugs.

Antibacterial soaps are a marketing ploy and nothing more...all soaps are antibacterial. How well a given soap removes bacteria from your hands is directly proportional to how well you clean your hands (i.e: do you just get them wet, or do you really soap up and scrub them down). Bacteria aren't some magical things that can survive the same conditions that will remove dirt, grime, oil, protein, salt, and metals from your hands. Some companies throw in a little bit of antiseptic to get people to buy their soap, but it is no more or less effective than regular soap, and at the concentrations present, it is highly unlikely to cause resistant bacterial strains to develop.

Re:Don't panic

[cciRRus]

I've cured my own eczema enough that it doesn't bother me for about 10months out of 12. How? Its a selection of things, but the worse problem for mine was when the air was humid it would go mental.

I don't think that's considered "curing". Your skin problem is still there just that you minimize the chances of it occurring.

Re:Don't panic

[fain0v]

Doctors are not some evil group that wants you to suffer with a disease. They are usually people that go into the profession to cure people. They dont develop the treatments either. They memorize what the symptoms and treatments are and act accordingly.

Now then, who develops the treatments? For the most part, drug companies do. They are also not evil people, but they ARE in it for the money because they have to be. They target chronic diseases where people will be treated for a long time, and acute diseases where they will make a lot of money. If during their research they discovered that say "Motion sickness pills cured migraines", the results would be completly ignored because there was no money to be made.

There are however other groups that do research into diseases. Academic and government labs. Many orphan diseases are researched by these groups and treatments have certainly come out from them.

Now whose fault is it that an easy cure is available that you know about, and it is not being used?

Its YOUR FAULT!

If you know how to cure a disease in a simple manner, dont just sit on your butt and bitch about the establishment. Make contacts with non-profit organizations in that area. Get them to give money to a lab that is qualified to test your treatment. Get them to publish the results. Until that time, no one will take it seriously. Science and medicine are full of stuborn people, but they will change their mind if presented with enough evidence.

Re:Don't panic

[arivanov]

• Eczema can be treated very effectively with a combination of lifestyle change (avoiding irritants such as dust, pets, chemicals etc.),

Been there, Done all that. All wonderfull british carpets are out of the house, no pets, no allergenic plants, household chemicals are vetted for use and taken off the list of allowed stuff at the slightest suspicion, the house is vaccum cleaned at a frequency which makes all my friends think I am mad. On top of that, the horsepiss supplied by UK water companies under the name of "water" is filtered and treated for the entire house. All of this made the situation better, but did not solve it completely.

• emollients (moisturisers)

Interesting to hear this from an almost ready British MD. None of the really effective ones are available on NHS in Britain and the best ones are not even on the allowed import list so I have to ask friends who go to Germany, France or the third and fifth world to buy them. More specifically Trixera is not prescribable and Linolafet, Atoderm and Topyalise series are not on the import list at all. You cannot buy them even by mail order (so much for the common EU market).

• and topical steroids.

The effective ones (Prednisolone and Co) cause obesity, behavioral changes and learning difficulties in prolonged use. The ineffective ones - well they are ineffective.

• There are also newer treatments such as tacrolimus which can be applied to the skin to modify the immune response.

This one does work for a short period. After that the organism adjusts its immune responce and there is no more effect. To add insult to injury, I had to go to a fifth world country and the "village" dermatologist in a small city in the middle of nowhere knew about it. None of the clowns I had to deal with in the UK even considered it. One consluttant in BUPA knew about it, but it took me mentioning the third world village dermatologist to get this to be even considered.

• The vast majority of people with eczema if treated appropriately can be absolutely symptom-free.

As they say this in the UK - utter bollocks

• Lee (soon to be MBBS, UK equivalent of MD).

Aaaa... That explains it... NHS doctor in the making... As my wife nowdays says about Green Wing: not funny, this is not a sitcom, it is a documentary.

P.S. By the way, it is my kid who got eczema, not me.

Re:Don't panic

[cpu_fusion]

Your comment is funny, but I have to speak up personally here as it concerns me this particular epidemic is not being taken seriously.

My mother, now in her mid 50s, has been suffering from something precisely like this. I say "something", because she has received absolutely no help to date from the medical community. Dermatologists tell her it is all in her head, and it has made her life completely miserable. Just looking the scarring all over her face, I find it a violation of the hypocratic oath that she is told it is all in her head. She's had it three years and is a teacher (which along with nurses is the #1 group that has this).

I know we all want to think this is just a joke, but consider this your two degrees of seperation from a sufferer.

What's worse is that the CDC is pulling a Katrina with this one and just waving their hands, hoping it will leave them alone.

Re:Don't panic

[thatiger]

I lived in Nigeria and actually had eczema as a child. My grandparents suggested a drink of a traditional coctail every morning which was composed of juice from a certain tree bark. About a week later, I was told to wash of my body with the same liquid. I was pleasantly suprised to see that I was eczema free about two days later. I've never had an eczema relapse since.

Re:Don't panic

[wkcole]

Antibacterial soaps are a marketing ploy and nothing more...all soaps are antibacterial.

True, but the post you are responding to does have a valid point. The "antibacterial" soaps have ingredients other than soaps and synthetic detergents (primarily triclosan) which have specific antimicrobial properties. Soap and synthetic detergents (commonly Sodium laureth sulfate in hand soap) are antibacterial in rather gross and non-specific ways: they bind both water and lipids, and so disrupt cell structure physically by breaking down cellular membranes. The greater toxicity of soaps to bacteria than the people they are stuck to is largely due to the fact that the human cells involved have more complex membranes and are generally already dead and hardened with protein, and they provide an armor of sorts. Immerse any living human cell in soapy water that would kill a bacterium, and the human cell will die just the same.

Triclosan is believed to be more toxic to microbes than people because it disrupts critical bacterial enzymes that humans simply do not have. The flip side of that is ugly: mutations in the genes coding those enzymes can result in Triclosan-resistent bacteria. So we are awash in Triclosan-containing soaps and even toothpaste which may be killing off some small increment more bacteria than if we didn't use it in soap, and flushing the stuff down our drains, some getting there by way of our guts. Is it killing off bacteria we want to keep around? Maybe. Is it creating an environmental pressure for the evolution of Triclosan-resistant bacteria? Definitely. This is a particularl;y bad thing because Triclosan is used in stronger concentrations in medical disinfecting. Pervading the environment with the stuff means that we have this huge breeding reservoir for a resistant strain, and we'll know it exists when it makes its way into hospitals that rely on Triclosan...

And the stuff might not be as human-safe as once thought. Ignoring the issue of effects on symbiotic bacteria, Triclosan may well disrupt some human enzymes, just not the obviously critical one it hits in bacteria. Anyone who claims a solid answer to that mystery is probably selling some variety of snake oil (either "long-acting toothpaste" or "detoxifying herbaceuticals" or "cutting board disinfectant" or "colon cleansing")

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

"Antibacterial soaps are a marketing ploy and nothing more..."

Not entirely if you live in the US. Antibacterial labeled soaps are FDA regulated. This is defined more or less under the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

If soap is advertised as just soap or a clensing agent, nothing more, it's not under FDA regulation, even if it contains additional antibacterial compounds or perfumes.

If you call a perfume, or what not, it's considered a cosmetic and falls under whatever regs apply as decided by the FDA.

Similarly, if you label it antibacterial or antidandruff or antilice or something, it is considered a drug. Then, at minimum, the ingredients must be listed on the product. Not so if you just call it plain "soap." Also, I believe additional regulations come into play, such as showing some level of efficacy of the product (which may or may not be actual for real life use), which in turn most companies then DO add additional compounds to the soap to meet those regs and then add that ingredient to the label.

"all soaps are antibacterial"

I agree given the nature of what soap is or does.

But it needs to be noted that some companies label their soap products anyways, even if it is not required. If you compare the ingredients of many major soap brands that are labeled antibacterial versus the same brand that is not labeled antibacterial, you'll usually see a difference in their formulation.

For example, triclosan is added to many antibacterial soaps. It is antibacterial, but a rather useless one; it has like a 12 hour span before it starts to act (bacteria start to die and even then not in large numbers). Which, for an antibacterial, is sort of stupid given what your hands, face, or body will acquire in those 12 hours of normal life.

I appeared to be somewhat allergic to triclosan and avoid most soaps labeled antibacterial.

Re:Don't panic

[n0dna]

Yes, but he would have had to break into your apartment.

Re:Don't panic

[Ptraci]

I'm sorry but I have difficulty beleving you have a chemistry degree and you still manage to conflate sulfanilamide and sulfur. The ingredients in shampoos and soaps are sulfates, containing sulfur, not the antibiotic. I am genuinely allergic to sulfa, but I can use most shampoos with no ill effect, except those with certain perfumes or dyes, which have other chemicals that I happen to be allergic to. Sodium laurel sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate are in most shampoos that I DO use.

Re:Don't panic

[hr raattgift]

Even more importantly, resistance to triclosan would not be the same as resistance to vancomycin or methicillin, so misuse of triclosan would not contribute to the development of "superbugs".

Triclosan is a topical biocide applied externally in creams and pastes which allow it to linger. Vancomycin, by contrast, must be administered intravenously becuase it does not cross the intestinal lining. The stronger members of penicillin family are also often administered intravenously because most of them denature rapidly in gastric acids. These and triclosan have totally different modes of operation (triclosan interferes with fatty acid production; penicillins and vancomycin interfere with peptidoglycan production in different ways -- the former inhibits a final crosslinking and the latter prevents the incorporation of two subunits). Mutations in transpeptidase (PBP) which may confer resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillin would do nothing with respect to the organism's potential resistance to triclosan.

With respect to triclosan, the literature is filled with evidence repudiating the Stuart Levy speculative statement on acquired triclosan resistance. Generally speaking, triclosan has been in wide use as a topical biocide for some thirty years and there are no peer-reviewed studies demonstrating acquired resistance with long term use. There are resistant bacteria which either overexpress FabI or which have mutant FabI that does not as readily form the stable ternary compound FabI-NAD+-triclosan. Those bacteria continue to produce enough fatty acids to survive triclosan exposure, but at some cost. Overproduction of FabI wastes energy and the mutant FabIs typically incur an energy or time cost in the production of fatty acids, so these organisms are at a disadvantage in the absence of triclosan.

This disadvantage leads to fewer viable offspring expressing these traits, which in a population causes the phenotype reversion that you mention. (Individuals may kick around in smaller numbers, so that when the population is stressed with triclosan, the population will "de-revert". This happens with a wide variety of toxins.

Triclosan is the focus of occasional health panics for a variety of reasons. Acquired resistance is just one complaint; others are breakdown products, especially into dioxins (exposure to UV), and an almost inevitable but very small amount of polychlorinated dioxins and furans as side effects of produciton. The panics involve either environmental concerns or bioaccumulation in people using products -- whether topical/external (like hand soap) or internal (toothpaste).

However, it's been pretty widely used in the past couple of decades in formulations which allow triclosan to stick around so as to inhibit the growth of microbes which survive washing with sodium lauryl sulphate and other surfactants. There is hardly a poisoning epidemic in evidence... Some people are mildly allergic to triclosan; this is most often seen in people who form mouth chancres (aphthous stomatitis) -- triclosan may exacerbate outbreaks. (On the other hand, mouth cankers are weird things, and there is also some evidence that triclosan may soothe symptoms...)

Where's the story?

[xtal]

If you have strange sores, or another infection, a biopsy will reveal abnormalities. The fact the CDC has not been sent any sample by a trained medical professional (or so the article claims), leads me to question the validity of the claims. There -are- procedures in place to deal with undiagnosed infections.

I'm not seeing the story here, and I'm reluctant to believe there is a grand conspiracy keeping a single sample from making it to the CDC.

Re:Where's the story?

[Yehooti]

Maybe someone might benefit from my solutions to my various skin problems encountered over the years. Warts--CP Nitric Acid until it hurts, then soaked in a baking soda solution until it stops fizzing. Unknown reason lesions--soaked in a 50/50 mixture of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide/ 91% Isopropyl Alcohol until you get bored. These things have worked for me in the past. Maybe trying them next time will kill me, so if you want to try them consider that possibility (for you, not me).

Really, I believe that too many of the cures of old are considered considered as folk medicine today and discounted without further trial. If you can't get it via Rx, then it isn't valid. Bullspit! Sure no story in homebrewed solutions.

Re:Where's the story?

[ChrisMaple]

It seems as if all wart cures (except the duct tape cure) are based upon the principle that if you kill all the flesh that the cure comes in contact with, you'll cure the wart. Your nitric acid cure falls in that category.

H2O2 is more selective; this sounds like an excellent approach.

Re:Where's the story?

[brennz]

Whether or not the CDC has sent staff to investigate Morgellon's claims *DOES NOT* relate to the validity of the claims. You need to brush up on logic and fallacies
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/

I'd advise looking at http://www.morgellons.org/ since that site has more detail for medical professionals.

Re:Where's the story?

[smellsofbikes]

CP nitric is expensive, and stains your skin -- as you no doubt know. Doctors used to use trichloroacetic acid (I don't know what they use now) but before that, they used simple hydrochloric acid, aka muriatic acid, available at hardware stores for paint stripping. One interesting thing about HCl is that it differentially stains the tissue infected with HPV, for reasons I've never heard anyone discuss, but it's how they mark lesions when treating cervical cancer. (Yeah, basically, they fill the woman's cervical area with hydrochloric acid. Lovely, huh?) If I were doing this at home I don't think I'd neutralize it for several hours because that'll allow the HCl to penetrate. The problem is that HPV has significant vertical development in the skin, so just hitting and killing the top will make it go away for a while but not permanently. What it actually does is signal (through damage) the immune system that something's wrong there, and the macrophages that penetrate into the area to try and fight off infection end up killing the adjacent, infected cells, and eventually that serves to make the wart spontaneously go away. The average time for spotaneous remission is about 7 years, if I recall correctly from my virology classes. But, yeah, use HCl and it doesn't have to be anywhere near commercially pure. 20% would probably be just fine. There are actually good reasons for using dilute materials -- the reason that rubbing alcohol is 70% is not because it can't be made more pure, but because if it is more pure it'll actually clot proteins, like making an omlette, which will prevent it penetrating. Somewhat more dilute solutions can get much more deeply into a bacterial colony. I don't know that the smae thing holds with mineral acids on HPV infections, but it seems a better idea to start dilute and move towards concentrated until you find an effective concentration.

Attention! Attention!

[BlackMesaLabs]

The infected are known to be hostile and will attack you on sight! Do not take chances! Use extreme caution!
The only way to stop the infected is by destroying the brain or severing the head from the body!
The government advises all citizens to return to their places of residence and begin stockpiling water and food. Do not make contact with any infected persons!

Re:Attention! Attention!

[chiller2]

No problem mate. I'm off down the Winchester ;)

By the way, you've got red on you!

...or not

[EvilMagnus]

Or it could be the crazies have found one of the internets again.

My local hospital had a patient reporting something very similar - claimed that bugs were eating her and her son, and she was itching all over. Examination showed she did, in fact, have rashes - from direct self-inflicted skin irritation - and the 'bugs' she'd captured in a little baggy were most definitely lint.

She got told to stop scratching and put some cream on it, and she got a nice friendly psych consult.

Never, ever underestimate how many crazies there are. Just ask anyone in retail or another customer-facing industry if you don't believe me.

Re:...or not

[Ohreally_factor]

I've known people with this "disease" for almost 20 years. You know what else these people had in common? They were all speed freaks, crystal meth addicts. These people need a visit to the rehab (or puzzle palace, if they're not on drugs), not the dermatologist.

It's also in the opening chapter of A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the _Britannica_, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house. He read about many different kinds and finally noticed bugs outdoors, so he concluded they were aphids. After that decision came to his mind it never changed, no matter what other people told him . . . like "Aphids don't bite people."

They said that to him because the endless biting of the bugs kept him in torment. At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard. First he sprayed the house, then himself. The Yard Guard seemed to work the best.

As to the theoretical side, he perceived three stages in the cycle of the bugs. First, they were carried to him to contaminate him by what he called Carrier-people, which were people who didn't understand their role in distributing the bugs. During that stage the bugs had no jaws or mandibles (he learned that word during his weeks of scholarly research, an unusually bookish occupation for a guy who worked at the Handy Brake and Tire place relining people's brake drums). The Carrier-people therefore felt nothing. He used to sit in the far corner of his living room watching different Carrier-people enter--most of them people he'd known for a while, but some new to him--covered with the aphids in this particular nonbiting stage. He'd sort of smile to himself, because he knew that the person was being used by the bugs and wasn't hip to it.

"What are you grinning about, Jerry?" they'd say.

He'd just smile.

In the next stage the bugs grew wings or something, but they really weren't precisely wings; anyhow, they were appendages of a functional sort permitting them to swarm, which was how they migrated and spread--especially to him. At that point the air was full of them; it made his living room, his whole house, cloudy. During this stage he tried not to inhale them.

Most of all he felt sorry for his dog, because he could see the bugs landing on and settling all over him, and probably getting into the dog's lungs, as they were in his own. Probably--at least so his empathic ability told him--the dog was suffering as much as he was. Should he give the dog away for the dog's own comfort? No, he decided: the dog was now, inadvertently, infected, and would carry the bugs with him everywhere.

Sometimes he stood in the shower with the dog, trying to wash the dog clean too. He had no more success with him than he did with himself. It hurt to feel the dog suffer; he never stopped trying to help him. In some respect this was the worst part, the suffering of the animal, who could not complain.

"What the fuck are you doing there all day in the shower with the goddamn dog?" his buddy Charles Freck asked one time, coming in during this.

Jerry said, "I got to get the aphids off him." He brought Max, the dog, out of the sh

Re:...or not

[B3ryllium]

Ah HAH. The movie Scanner Darkly is coming out soon. It's a viral marketing gag. Although I guess in this case it's a parasite, not a virus ... ;-)

Re:...or not

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, if this whole disease is a viral marketing gag for ASD, I've got to hand it to the people who put it together. First they have you thinking it's a real disease, then you realize it's delusional in nature, then you realize it's deliberately delusional. Nifty.

Re:...or not

[B3ryllium]

Both of the websites I've been linked to today, morgellons.org and morgellonsusa.com, are registered by anonymous DNS-by-proxy companies.

It reeks to high heaven of marketing hoopla.

Re:...or not

[B3ryllium]

I've noticed that at least one of the supposed links are dead. As for how they got the media to buy in ...

The wikipedia article was created in Feb of 2005. It contained a one-sentence summary and a link to the website. The website is registered by a dns proxy company, so there's no DNS contact information. Ooh, another bizarre coincidence - the supposed "national news broadcast" has been postponed until "june or july"; release date of the movie is July 7th. When looking at it in a paranoid mindset, lots of things on the site are curious. Including the DISTINCT lack of decent contact information. I've found only a few email addresses so far. Ironically, the only person whose domain I've been able to nail down as non-anonymous is the supposed webmaster. And his site is cheesily amusing in its own right. :)

The Scanner Darkly had its recent release date, September 16th, pushed back to some time in March, 2006." - as you can see, it's been bumped around a fair amount.

Re:...or not

[Aurelius]

There is a Morgellons Foundation and they give out big grants. One of the Pharmacology professors at OSU-HSC received one of the grants to lead the research into the "disease." I've been in the academic world a long time and haven't run across too many professors who would turn down a pile of money to research a little known disease. Randy Wymore happens to be a really sharp guy too, I think he's mostly trying to keep an open mind about it, but so far it looks like the craziness that we assume it is.

What the..

[ElScorcho]

This website reads like timecube. What's with the baby blue background, gratuitous overuse of "quotation marks", and broad statements about the medical community willfully ignoring the person? Can we perhaps get some authoritative sites? Seriously, doctors are just as curious as the rest of us and if there were really something here I'm sure there would be papers on it. All the evidence this site presents are out-of-context photos of some fibrous stuff. For all I know that's your belly button lint.

Re:What the..

[bcmm]

I really couldn't say way, but really attention-seekingly bad design almost always signifies a crackpot's website.

All-bold paragraphs, too many different fonts, unpleasant use of primary and secondary colours (especially in solid-colour backgrounds), and, even more than the rest, all-centred paragraphs are almost always found on the websites of conspiracy theorist, UFO nuts or new religions. Seriously, search for some conspiracy or new-age related terms on the web, and you'll see what I mean (this generally only applies to people trying to let people know what they think, not to people trying to make a profit).

News?

[Bieeanda]

More like tinfoil-hat bullshit. Sorry folks, but Morgellons is a particularly sad expression of schizophrenia, not a strange space-age malady that makes you break out in deep-pile shag.

It's particularly telling that the 'big' sites that 'cover' this 'malady' don't actually show pictures of symptomatic sufferers or anything noteworthy like that. No, instead we get useless SEM photos of fibres, bits of dust and ECU shots of cat scratches.

New story title ...

[icepick72]

Grow Your Own Sweater.

So, is that a race or a specific space tyrant?

[djSpinMonkey]

"Morgellan's Syndrome?" Dude, that still sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie. Do they cure it by reversing the polarity of Jordie's visor and routing a graviton particle beam through Data's knee?

Re:So, is that a race or a specific space tyrant?

[ScrewMaster]

Do they cure it by reversing the polarity of Jordie's visor and routing a graviton particle beam through Data's knee?

Nope. It's a verteron pulse.

Re:So, is that a race or a specific space tyrant?

[B3ryllium]

I think it's a viral campaign for an upcoming Robert Downey Jr movie ... :)

This is science?

[stoneymonster]

Perhaps you should change the icon from Einstein to Miss Cleo.

HTH, HAND.

I am a dermatologist, and I see patients with this

[NXIL]

This is referred to as "delusions of parasitosis".

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic939.htm

The *sensation* they have is "real", not to sound like Morpheus: feels like bugs in skin. The sensation goes away quickly when Pimozide is prescribed.

It's not all that uncommon.

It's very hard to convince patients that they need Pimozide, and not a can of "Raid" to spray on themselves.

There's another web site that has been around longer relating to the same issue:

http://www.skinparasites.com/

They misinterpret lint, fibers, dust, and other debris as parasites; sort of a variant of hearing voices/OCD/other disorders where sensations are spurious or can't be correctly decoded.

hoax

[dan14807]

It's a hoax. Notice how all of the images of exotic multi-colored fibers are close-ups where you can't see the person or the sores they talk about. The pictures of people with sores on them show people with plain sores.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'd mod you up if I had poist

[Critical_]

I'd mod you up if I had points. I'm a medical student and I got the chance to take a history on a patient claiming to have this syndrome. It ended up that we gave him risperidone. If I'm not mistaken, pimozide has some fairly bad side effects and isn't normally prescribed these days. Then again, I'm only a med student.

Re:I'd mod you up if I had poist

[NXIL]

What's the difference between a medical student and dog crap?

                        No one goes out of their way to step on dog crap.....

You are quite correct--best to get an EKG/watch for extrapyramidal side effects, but, I have found that very low doses of Pimozide are effective, on the order of 1 or 2 mg a day, not a full antipsychotic dose.

Most difficult therapeutic maneuver is building trust--not at all easy to get them to take anything at all. I just try to be very honest, reassuring, kind--sort of like Mr. Rogers.

UCLA Med School: awesome....congrats.

These people are in need of attention

[SirFlakey]

..One way or another. Ok, so I laughed at the "Grow your own sweater" comment =) but let's face it Only two options here - it's fake an in their heads or it's real and it's a problem. In the latter case, there are a LOT of strange diseases out there, we have procedures and people to investigate this and so they should. In the former case they still need help, though arguably of a psychiatric nature.

The healthcare professionals (Doctors/etc) should really not be turning these people away quite so easily imho. Yep we have a lot of 'crazy people' out there but it probably doesn't help having them sit in the corner of their houses spraying themselves with Raid/Baygon.

Re:These people are in need of attention

[blincoln]

The healthcare professionals (Doctors/etc) should really not be turning these people away quite so easily imho.

It's very difficult to properly treat someone who is delusional. In most of the US, patients cannot be forced into treatment unless they are actively suicidal or homicidal. In my experience, it's not that doctors turn them away, it's that they refuse to accept what's really going on and leave on their own.

Obligatory Simpsons quote

[D H NG]

Dr. Nick Riviera: "Sir, calm down, you're going to give yourself skin failure. The symptoms you describe lead me to believe that you are suffering from bonus eruptus, a rare disorder in which the skeleton tries to jump out of the skin. The only way to stop it is through transdental electromicide. I'll need a golf cart motor and a thousand volt capacimator, stat."

The one that really scares me...

[rdmiller3]

One of the links for this "disease" talked about a woman who was taking her two-year-old son to the doctor because she thought he had it.

Since these fibers are obviously ordinary textile fuzz and lint, that means that the poor kid's delusional mom is inflicting the condition upon him. I hope that their doctor had the sense to contact someone in Social Services.

Don't worry

[DoubleRing]

Don't worry, I have mod points! Oh, wait...

Re:I am a dermatologist, and I see patients with t

[blincoln]

The *sensation* they have is "real", not to sound like Morpheus: feels like bugs in skin.

Yes, this is (IMO) one of the more bizarre aspects of psychosis - it's not just the the people suffering from it *believe* in things that aren't true, they actually experience some of them directly.

I've known a couple of people with schizophrenia, and while it's a terrible condition, it gave me a lot of respect for the power of our minds.

/. morons - It could be a actual condition

[Vskye]

Mod me down, that's fine. First off, most of the comments here did'nt even RTFA and just looked at the pics. Yet most answers should be modded down to 0. Why is this far fetched? Never woke up getting bit, had a cockroach in you're mouth, (never lived down south heh?) or had other weird bug experiences? Some people have extreme reations to stuff, like.., trees, grass, anything non-concrete, mold, and insects. (list can go on and on.) So, why is so *ucking impossible? I used to think that carpal tunnel was bs, but a few months ago I had a sharp pain in my right arm, and now I'm due for surgery in June. Poof!

Re:/. morons - It could be a actual condition

[DAldredge]

Have you noticed that /. has become a playground for 16 year olds who appear to not know a damn thing about tech/programming/anything nerdy?

before calling the CDC...

[Anonymous Coward]

Partially off topic: I have an undiagnosed skin infection that's flummoxed more than a dozen real doctors in real clinics and hospitals for more than a year. BUT it's not spreading, only verly slowly leaving soem ugly scarring on the affected skin. I've been through viral id and fungal tests (all negative) but since they determined only by elimination that the cellulitis must be bacterial, I can't get any of the GP or dermatologists to do anything but throw antibiotics at me. More than 10 courses of antibiotics later (including Cipro and topical Clindamyacin), I'm basically just containing the infection and slowly accumulating more scar tissue.

...But I can't seem to get anyone to do a damn culture. I've never before been refused a referral, but I get the brush-off or referral to unavailable doctors when I request the one thing that could simply identify the problem. Short of calling the CDC and sounding like a kook, what's a guy to do when the local medical resources just aren't interested in your weird condition because you're neither particularly interesting, nor actively dying?

Particularly Disturbing

[monoqlith]

This isn't surprising at all. As someone who has been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia with affective symptoms(schizoaffective disorder) because I brought myself into the emergency room with tachycardia, panic, and what appeared to me to be some kind of neurodegenerative illness(I literally could not think), I doubt that the patients in this story are making up what they feel. They certainly must feel the sensation of itching, scratching - it is just as real to them as the breakfast they eat. In my case, it was neurological Lyme disease, which the doctors in question failed to test for and failed to diagnose, prescribing an antipsychotic medication - claiming I was delusional - which made my symptoms much, much worse. However, after seeking out the help of a psychiatrist and neurologist, I was offered correct treatment for the Lyme disease that I was originally diagnosed for in 1989 - when I was six years old - and for which I had been treated inadequately. After intravenous treatment with antibiotics and immune-modulating drugs, my brain became sharp again - indeed, sharper than it has been since I was a small child, before my brain had fully developed. Schizophrenia doesn't go away with antibiotics, and usually neither does severe cognitive decline - Lyme disease does.

In this case, there's a suspicious connection reported on multiple web sites about people with this disease being co-diagnosed with Lyme disease. While this "Morgellons" parasite-disease may be a delusion, it probably has a neurologic, organic cause, due to suddenness of onset and other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if the cause turned out to be Lyme disease, which can have a wide range of neuropsychiatric effects including delusions, hallucinations, memory problems, suicidal and homicidal ideation, thought disorder, and severe cognitive deficits . One quote from TFA is quite telling:

Ginger Savely, a nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas, says she has treated 35 patients with symptoms. "Everyone tells the exact same story," she says. "It's just so consistent." Savely prescribes her patients a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics. "If I knew what I was dealing with," she says, "it would be easier to treat." Yet, she says, her patients--including Lawrence--improve within weeks.

. The fact that it may respond to antibiotics may indicate some relation to a bacterial illness, in particular Lyme. It's truly an insidious disease that can go undetected and undiagnosed for many years while patients' lives deteriorate - and no doctors are literate enough in the treatment of this disease to treat it adequately.

In any case, the medical establishment is often too quick to diagnose a patient with a complaint it does not understand as a primary-onset psychiatric disorder. By doing this, they cause a great deal of harm by delaying treatment in the case that the disease is *not* a psychiatric disorder. In order for medicine to be able to heal people, it needs to stop this trend and start taking earnest, persistent reports of people's pain seriously - even if it is delusional. If all of the possible organic causes have been researched and exhausted, only then is it time to take out the prescription pad for anti-psychotic or other psychiatric medication.

Re:Particularly Disturbing

[twalk]

I also have late stage lyme.

I can fully attest that you can give many doctors more information about what's happening than they can ever image getting from a patient, and still have them tell you it's all in your head.

To be blunt, if you've never been in this sort of situation before, you don't have the slightest clue about what you're talking about.

As for lyme disease specifically, it's very, very well known that the tests for it are horribly inaccurate. Even worse, if you do get a positive result, the doctor probably doesn't have a clue about antibiotic treatment of a neurological condition and making sure that the abx can get past the blood-brain barrier. (ie, your chance for a correct diagnosis is slim, and your chance for correct treatment is even slimmer.)

Mental Illness is a Real Illness

[reporter]

Though mental illness may prompt laughter from some quarters, mental illness is a serious issue.

In the issue at hand, there may be a common, tangible factor causing the numerous instances of Morgellon's Syndrome. Given the horrendous amount of chemicals that accumulate in non-organic foods, would anyone be surprised that these chemicals may be affecting the operation of the human brain?

Has anyone done an analysis of the types of food that victims (of Morgellon's Syndrome) eat? Is there a pattern?

Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness

[Lord Balto]

I have migraine disease, which is triggered by the ingestion of foods that contain fungi or products of fungi (yeast, cheese, vinegar, wine, dried milk, ad nauseum), and I can assure you that there is nothing unusual about food causing symptoms in all parts of the body. Keep in mind that the blood circulates once every 10 seconds. And I will second the statement that modern 10-minute "burger-style" medicine is virtually worthless if you have anything other than the most common of ailments. Add to this the corporate superstructure of many practices these days and you might as well be living in Uganda and consulting the local witch doctor. And the arrogant little prigs actually get prissy with you if you dare to question their 5-minute diagnoses.

Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness

[orangesquid]

Something that used to cause bizarre delusions, hallucinations, and misperceptions in mideival times was tainted rye bread.

Some of these things _really_ sound like a bad acid trip to me. I'm not kidding---what if these people do have some bizarre infectious agent that causes rashes and secretes hallucinogenic agents into the bloodstream, making the rashes appear to be outlandish and twirl out of the skin and dance around inside your arms?

Hallucinogens as potent as LSD-25 are extremely difficult to detect. If this is a new, unusual, and very strong hallucinogen (perhaps one that doesn't cause the notorious pupil dilatation that would normally be a tip-off of a chemically-altered mental state) secreted by an infectious agent, it would all add up, at least in my eyes.

Has this possibility even been investigated? It would also be consistent with the disease being treatable with BOTH anti-infectious and anti-psychotic methods.

Of course, this doesn't entirely explain the pictures on the MRF website... but perhaps some of the things being labelled as Morgellons don't involve the same infectious agent at all.

Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness

[mangu]

Given the horrendous amount of chemicals that accumulate in non-organic foods

As compared to the ridiculously small amount of chemicals that accumulate in "organic" food, perhaps? Everything material is "chemical", all matter is composed of chemical elements. It's ridiculous to assume that a chemical compound is automatically suspect of being dangerous if it was produced in a human factory instead of a plant or animal in nature.

Think of all the extremely toxic chemical compounds found in nature: snakes, spiders, scorpions, mushrooms, salmonella, botulism, anthrax. Think of curare, strychnine, nicotine, nature produces many toxins that are more dangerous than the most mortal chemical weapon of mass destruction man has invented.

Re:Mental Illness is a Real Illness

[lawpoop]

"Some of these things _really_ sound like a bad acid trip to me."

Actually, I think there's only one symptom that sounds like a bad acid trip, and that's Formication, or delusional parasitosis. It's the feeling of bugs crawling on your skin when there's actually not any bugs crawling on your skin.

I doubt it would be any kind of hallucinogenic drug. The main reason is that there are no other mind-altering symptoms, such as change of body perception (i.e. being a giant, having wings, etc), change of perception of time, hallucinations, other kinds of delusions, and so forth . I would be very surprised if there were some kind of chemical agent that *only* cause formication.

I actually suspect this could be a parasite. The thing about parasitic skin infections is that you actually feel like things are crawling inside your skin. The difference between delusional parasitosis and actually having parasites in your skin is that a delusional person doesn't really have parasites -- otherwise both feel that they have bugs crawling in their skin. Here in the relatively developed United States, people rarely get skin parasites, so the common perception is that the feeling of bugs on your skin is a a symptom of craziness.

The sores that open up on peoples' skin and the strands or fibers could be the method of reproduction. Similiar to how small pox spreads through the germ in small pox sores.

Re:A new low

[xstonedogx]

Even the article makes it abundantly clear that an infection is not the problem. The real story here is the stigma attached to anything relating to mental health. That is not to say these people are not suffering. The problem is they refuse the professional's opinion out of hand. These people are so frightened of being considered "delusional" that they act in ways that make the rest of us think they are nuts:

When Miles Lawrence sped to the hospital, he was told he had delusional parasitosis and that the weird spines were "just dirt." But over the next week his symptoms got worse. He scratched at his elbows and noticed more fibers, and little black specks. "It was like they were fighting back," he says.

It is more important to Lawrence to insist he is not delusion (or perhaps there are some other incentives, such as being special enough to be written into a Popular Mechanics article, or the attention one receives when one has a scary-sounding disease such as "Morgellons Syndrome") than to end his suffering through several apparently effective cures. Those that allow treatment see the alleviation of symptoms within weeks!

How to get attention;

[xtal]

Step 1: Get a written statement from one, two, or perferably, three GP's or dermatologists you have an undiagnosable skin condition or other aliment that is not psychological in nature.

Step 2: Get a phone book or google and find out the nearest university medical research center in your geographic area.

Step 3: Armed with the affadavits in Step 1, contact professors at the university specializing in pathology, dermatology, biology.. just about any -ology except geology, or phrenology, haha. You might have to try a couple, but you WILL find someone interested in your case. Those people have the training, resources, and credentials to find out if there is something novel about your condition. They will pay you no mind without Step 1.

Good luck.

Re:How to get attention;

[AndroidCat]

No geology? What if it's a bad case of continental drift?

Re:How to get attention;

[Anonymous Coward]

You likely won't get past step 1.

I have a rare medical condition (type of intersex condition). Visably androgynous patients tend to get treated pretty poorly by the medical profession (mostly due to anti-gay prejudice.) Although gay or HIV+ patients can usually find a doctor, even "gay-friendly" doctors don't want to deal with intersex patients.

The problem is 1) Most doctors don't want to deal with patients with rare conditions because they take up a lot of time, taking time away from other patients, 2) Doctors don't want to order lab tests, MRIs, etc for rare conditions because they fear insurance companies will deny it, 3) When they do order tests, they try to come up with a very vague diagnosis to see if they can sneak it by the insurance, and 4) Doctors never want to make a written statement that "Patient X has a rare disease" because they might have to defend it later.

So since you have no written diagnosis, and no evidence, no researcher will pay attention to you.

Re:How to get attention;

[pe1rxq]

If one can't fix you up, they'll get you to the partner who can. It's not unusual for them to direct you to the herb aisle before putting pen to script pad. They're very up on alternative treatments in general; e.g. acupuncture, and now that most insurances pay for it, it saves prolonged trial & error treatments.

Which says about enough about them... They are quacks.
If one quack's herbs won't help they will just refer you to the next quack's accupuncture needles.
They might calll themselves 'alternative' but the correct term is 'unproven' or for most of those treatments it is just 'proven to be total bullshit'.
The only reason insurances pay for it is because enough delluded people want to pay for it.

With those people there are only two possibilities: either they know that shit isn't working but folling you anyway, or dispite their years of medical training actually think it works and thus fail to have a basic understanding off simple scientific testing.
I wouldn't want to be treated by either one.

Re:wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Morgellons is not a hoax; the people are not crazy. Unfortunately, every one of you who is scoffing without ever having met a Morgellons patient or seen in person what they are talking about is being intellectually dishonest. I personally have not seen a patient but have been in contact with a scientist/researcher who has, and I trust him. A few professionals are trying to investigate the disease, but have not got funding. Gathering enough data right now is difficult. I think that shortly down the road after funding appears, there will be finally be some ability to document good evidence. Right now, researchers have limited evidence, depending mostly on samples sufferers mail in, which is a very poor way to get scientifically usable research materials.

We are in the early stages of this thing being accepted as even existing, but as more people show up with it, eventually the medical establishment will more likely take it seriously, too. When AIDS first appeared, it was not accepted as a real disease either.

It's unfortunate that a key symptom of Morgellons, the 'crawling bugs' sensation, matches a key symptom of chronic methamphetamine use, but while it could be argued that the bug sensation is purely a mental and unprovable symptom, the Morgellons sufferer is not certainly not imagining the demonstrable weird hairlike protrusions from their skin. No, it's not laundry lint. Samples have been analyzed and even PCR DNA analysis done. This is a real, a weird, and most certainly a parasitic-spread, disease, and a nasty one. This is not a game.

Please resist the temptation to scoff at unfortunate suffering people. You might be one of them soon: it is possible that one way that Morgellons is spreading is in contaminated bedding in hotels and motels. The US is experiencing some pretty serious outbreaks of bedbugs in the travel industry, and if Morgellons is spread by a parasitic mite, tick, or nematode as is theorized, it can and will be distributed the same way rapidly. The many illegals employed as maids in this industry, in California for example, have no concept of prevention, and bedbugs are getting to be a real problem for travellers. Even expensive hotels in New York City have a real problem with it.

The CDC finds that the US has a large increase in drug-resistent TB and leprosy coming in from illegal workers. It is not out of the question that parasitic-vectored diseases are also coming in too. A second possibility is that Morgellons is coming into the US in imported goods, such as furniture and clothing. It is interesting that the reported cases are much more prevalent in warm southern states or California. Could it be that insects in goods die if cold, and warmth helps them? The government should allocate some money allocated to investigate this. In these global times, the US is wide open and susceptible to little-recognized things. The Asian beetle came in with pallet wood from overseas, and now is devastating American native trees.

Who knows

[drgonzo59]

Some of people had the fibers that grow from their skin analyzed. They are cellulose but do not come from clothing. My hunch is that it is probably both mental and physical. There is something going on -- perhaps various species of scabies, skin mites (demodex foliculorum) and "friends", perhaps even some bacteria or fungi. Sometimes perhaps it has to be two of the factors at the same time.

. As for the mental part of the disease, it seems that humans over the thousands and thousands of years have developed a basic disgust and revulsion to small crawling things on the skin -- spiders, lice, bed bugs, centipedes, worms, scorpions and so on. There is a good reason for that, those things are associated with disease, poison bites, and un-cleanliness. On average, people would probably be less afraid of a wolf than of one of those creepy-crawly things. That is why it is not surprise that a good percentage of these cases are mental.

Mind you doctors still don't know that much about the human skin. There is no cure for rosacea -- some think it is the demodex mite that causes it, some think it is a bacterial infection, some suspect it is just genetic. Some antibiotics have been shown to work, sometimes lasers help too, but nothing definite. A lot of guess work. Doctors are not gods, they only know what other doctors may have published in a journal or by doing research themselves (rarely happens). So just because they haven't been able to find anything doesn't mean it is not there.

A homeopathic treatment?

[ortholattice]

The last link has a lot of pictures, and I feel sorry for that person if it is true, but it is strange that the actual skin lesions these fiber clusters came from are never shown, only the "stuff" that was supposedly pulled out of them. But the "Treatment Recommendations" on p. 5 certainly sounds like a testimonial/marketing brochure for "Taurox".

Taurox has been evaluated by homeopathic experts and is registered with the FDA.

Homeopathic experts?!?

Call Sharon now and use the following Code Number and because we are people "greatly in need," you get an additional 15% discount off of the price.

Right, and who gets a cut from this "Code Number"? Note that the person was already "80% better" (from standard antibiotic treatments) before the miracle of Taurox entered the picture, apparently providing that last 20% boost for the "fatigue" that remained after the mainstream treatment.

And the very odd thing is that the Morgellons Research Foundation site has no mention of Taurox at all.

Pictures

[jalet]

I can't speak about what these people feel, or why.

But, what I can speak about from experience, is that all the pictures on their website ARE NOT made by medical personnel or equipment, or else this personnel has to be fired. I know since I view medical pictures every day in the course of my job.

They are all blurred and noisy and there's no way to know the exact size of samples. This, more than the stories themselves, makes the whole difficult to be trusted.

BTW I've myself got a strange condition : I've got greenish, slimy, self reproducing insects which live in my nose, and which make me want to scratch it all the time. As of today, noone has been able to explain this very rare infection to me.

Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati

[Eunuchswear]

just look at the battles the homeopathic community has to fight; some of them are wackos perhaps, but many of them have treatments superior to those of "modern" medicine.

News for nerds? News for credulous nitwits these days. Somebody gave this an "insightful"?

Better safe than sorry...

[Etcetera]

I'm not one for quackery or anything else, nor do I know anyone who's had this "disease", nor do I believe there is some Giant Government Conspiracy to infect the population with chemtrails designed by Karl Rove or other nonsense...

But rather than freakin' dismissing everything as paranoia, wouldn't it be a good idea to actually *investigate* this? The article, along with a writeup in the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology bring a very important point. When diagnosing something as psychosomatic, make sure that the pyschological symptoms are the primary cause of what's going on, not secondary in nature or being caused by something else.

See also an interesting study from the Oklahoma Dept. of Health I found with 2 minutes of Googling.

Is it a bioengineered weapon from evil crazed oil companies? No. But whatever the underlying medical cause(s) of some of this is, it deserves a legitimate medical investigation. Isn't that what science is about?

Re:wow.

[AvitarX]

Actually it sounds to me like the people working them for minimum wage (or less) are also not training them to do their jobs.

The limited expierence I have had with hispanic workers of questionable legallity leads me to believe that they work far harder than the general population.

If someone has no concept of their job in a fairly siple procedural one like that it is the manager that is most at fault.

It kind of reminds me of the (made up) story about Sun Tzu where he is tested/dared to make soldiers out of women.

"if a general gives orders and they are not followed because they are unclear, it is the fault of the general".

Cleaning staff not cleaning do to "no concept" is a clear case of that, and the same people who will grossly take advantage of illegals to save a few dollors (minimum wage isn't much) are probably the same that would not train them to actually seperate dirty and clean and clean sheets propperly at the detriment of customers.

As for the resistant TB mentioned by GP, the real solution is to pressure Mexico into controlling Anti-biotics better so that the TB is killed, and not naturally selected to be more resistant (of course minimal free health care for our own less fortunate would probably help prevent resistant strains too).

Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati

[technothrasher]

What if there are other undiscovered disease agents? It's immensely hubristic to assume modern medicine has everything figured out yet.

This is the classic 'argument from ignorance'. To a some degree, you are correct- Lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack. However, this is only an argument of the possibility of something existing, not that something does actually exist. That's a pretty weak argument. It can be equally applied to almost any claim. Heck, it can be applied to Santa Claus existing.

just look at the battles the homeopathic community has to fight; some of them are wackos perhaps, but many of them have treatments superior to those of "modern" medicine.

Ah, now here you make a definitive argument: Homeopathic medicine is effective. However, you don't back it up with any evidence at all (and you've infected it with the old 'modern' medicine is ridgid strawman).

To anyone who thinks Morgellon's must necessarily be a load of nonsense

You've got it backwards. People aren't saying it "must necessarily" be nonsense. They're saying the evidence is weak, so it's not necessarily what the victims say it is. There are lots of possibilities about what is going on, from it being exactly what the victims claim to it being nothing at all, to a whole rainbow of things in between. So don't just accept it so readily. That's really showing a pretty closed mind. (And this goes for Homeopathy too, btw)

Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati

[SQL Error]

Doctors and medical researchers, like those in any other scientific field, have been taught a certain paradigm for understanding health and disease.

Yes, and that paradigm is: Examine the evidence.

Anything not explainable within that framework tends to be overlooked or ignored

Yep. When there's no evidence, doctors and medical researchers tend to ignore you, as do scientists and indeed all sane people.

just look at the battles the homeopathic community has to fight; some of them are wackos perhaps

And the remainder are frauds.

but many of them have treatments superior to those of "modern" medicine.

No. Modern medicine can provide sugar pills and distilled water just as well as any homeopath.

Reminds me...

[Ungulate]

Reminds me of a story from my local alternative weekly about a couple who contracted hookworms, but were diagnosed with delusional parasitosis when they went to doctors complaining of bugs under the skin. Just because something resembles the pathology of schizophrenia doesn't mean that it's not real, and getting a doctor to take you seriously isn't always easy. Morgellans sounds a little kooky, but I'm surprised to see so many Slashdotters dismissing it out of hand.

Hubris and alternative medicine

[mangu]

What if there are other undiscovered disease agents? It's immensely hubristic to assume modern medicine has everything figured out yet.

Oh, but it's not hubristic to assume homeopathic medicine had everything figured out 200 years ago? You don't need to know about bacteria and viruses, you don't need to know the molecular structure of proteins at all, you don't need to examine the evidence, you don't need to do any tests. Just stating that "like cures like" is enough... Talk about hubris!

If there are diseases for which we do not know the cure, the solution is not to go back to ignorance and superstition. Perhaps we do not have *the* cure for AIDS or the common cold or many types of cancer, but we do get better treatment all the time. Four years ago I had appendicitis. I was treated by laparoscopy, which was done through three small cuts in my belly, about one centimeter each. I spent two days in the hospital and have no visible scars today. How would a similar treatment be performed fifty years ago? Instead of sending a small remotely controlled equipment into the patient's body, the surgeon had to cut him up enough to get both hands inside.

There may be some very rare diseases that haven't caught the attention of modern medicine yet, but the most likely explanation for most of the patients that claim to have such a rare disease is a very common ailment: hypochondria. When I read about this so-called "Morgellon's syndrome", the symptoms seemed familiar, I have read about this before. Perhaps what's missing in modern medical training is teaching all GPs to send patients who have undiagnosed diseases with symptoms like chronic muscle pain, itching, skin rashes, unusual hair loss, difficulty in concentration and memory loss, etc, to psychiatric treatment.

Re:Like all establishments, medicine is conservati

[technothrasher]

Modern medicine can provide sugar pills and distilled water just as well as any homeopath.

I've got to disagree with you there. Homeopaths do a much more creative and fascinating job of providing sugar pills and distilled water. Homeopathic websites have provided me with hours of entertainment. I guess in truth it should upset me, but I don't really get emotionally envolved until they start applying their nonsense to veterinary medicine. That makes me go ballistic. Poor little guys have no way to say no.

A few obvious issues... what a troll

[sirwired]

If it is consistently cured with antibiotics, then it ISN'T a parasite. And bacteria don't create little worms crawling out of your skin. (Note, however, that parasitical infections can go away on their own.)

The woman in the article mentioned she saw spaghetti-like things crawling out of her son's chest. She pulled, but "couldn't pull it out." That is a very convenient excuse for not being able to produce a sample. Has this woman never heard of scissors, or are these things as tough as steel too?

Parisitologists and infectious disease researchers LIVE to discover new interesting afflictions. Believe me, if we had a new genuine disease causing spectacularly impressive crap to crawl out of victims skin, there would be journal articles about it in a minute. Also, wouldn't such obvious symptoms make it pretty damn easy to diagnose?

Lyme disease, yeah, that was a toughie to initially diagnose because the symptoms are so varied and suble. But fiber-like-stuff crawling out of people is pretty unambiguous.

And, "black flecks coming from pimples"? Err... sounds like blackheads to me.

That website is pathetic. Several pages of pictures, most of which look like shredded yarn scraps. It would have been a lot more convincing if there were pictures of the yarn crap actually coming from people. We do have some blurry shots of skin-like-substance with something on them, but nothing in particular to identify. Have these folks ever heard of "macro" mode?

I have heard of nasty parasitical infections indeed causing a crawling sensation inside the skin, and likewise inexperienced doctors thinking it is psychosomatic. However, in none of those cases was the diagnosis difficult once the actual worm/bug was dug out of the skin.

Either this "syndrome" was concocted by a complete nutjob, or this is the job of some "performance artist" trying to get an articles written up in various places.

SirWired

Re:wow.

[smidget2k4]

And man, to think, with that 10-12 years of college and specialized training, you apparently know better! You must be an absolute genius!

Seriously though, doctors are trained to help with the tools they have. They know better than you do. They went to college that long for a reason. It even says in the article that it can be treated with anti-psychotics AND anti-biotics, which leaves me to wonder if it could be treated just as well with placebo.

It was also interesting that when the doc in the article but a cast over the lesions, they healed right up! Interesting. Sounds like self-inflicted to me.

The problem here isn't the doctors, it is the cultural stigma toward needing to be treated for a psychological disorder. People don't want to do it because they don't see it as a real disease.

Sorry, no.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Not unless they got Popular Mechanics to back date a fake article to June, 2005.

So, apparently the hoax and viral marketing theories are both out the window, unless it's a hoax that's been years in the making.