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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."
Don't worry, I'm sure it can be cured with aromatherapy, reflexology, homeopathy and a large dose of serpentes lipids. . .
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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.
..don't panic
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.
-EvilMagnus
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.
Grow Your Own Sweater.
"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?
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.
No problem mate. I'm off down the Winchester ;)
By the way, you've got red on you!
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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.
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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, I have mod points! Oh, wait...
Before you die, you see DoubleRing...
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.
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?
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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:
. 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.
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!
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.
..don't panic
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)
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.
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.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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.