The media accept these views as incontroverted fact, and physicians are given the same message via the medical literature. However, a growing number of clinicians are rejecting the Steere et al philosophy in favor of a model that recognizes chronic infection as a real problem. In this essay presented at the 6th Annual International Conference on Lyme Borreliosis, Atlantic City, May 1993, Dr. Kenneth Liegner gives us his perspective on this controversy. Thanks to Contributing Editor Carl Brenner for obtaining reprint permission. Relapsing disease is obvious to any good clinician and to Lyme patients.
Relapses usually respond to re-institution of antibiotic therapy.
In some patients, Lyme disease is a chronic infection that antibiotic treatment suppresses, but does not eradicate. Rather, these apparently anomalous observations give insight into what is happening with many other patients in whom we are NOT able to produce the incontrovertible level of proof provided by isolating the organism. Paradigm change resisted. This is testimony to the power of mental constructs. A readily curable infection, on the other hand, is a much more tractable entity, with predictable and controllable economic consequences.