Treatment of Chronic Lyme Disease: Fifty-One Case Reports and Essays in Their Regard
The reader may wonder how a practicing physician from Milwaukee has chosen to present fifty-one case reports and eleven essays regarding his treatment of chronic Lyme disease. My involvement with Lyme disease started in 1989, when the son of a woman who was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) called me and suggested that his mother’s illness may have started when she developed a severe case of Lyme disease. Intrigued by his question, I investigated by having a study done by a professor of neurology at the medical school in Madison, Wisconsin, using sera that had been collected from a number of patients who had ALS. Enough of the sera showed antibodies to Borrelia burgdorferi to suggest that a relationship between ALS and Lyme disease may be present. We reported this finding in the medical journal The Lancet. This awakened my interest in Lyme disease, and I saw my first case in 1990. One thing led to another, and through word of mouth and sharing my experiences on my website, I began to see patients with chronic Lyme disease and to study this disease. By 2007, I was seeing patients with this disease on a regular basis, and this has continued to occur to the present.  To my wonderment, literature began to appear, written by some of my respected colleagues, that in a sense denied that the syndrome of chronic Lyme disease occurs (see essay 4 in this book). Accordingly, I felt that the time had come to share my experience with this syndrome with my colleagues and with individuals who are unfortunate enough to have chronic Lyme disease.  This book is based on my experiences in the practice of what I had termed “investigative internal medicine” for greater than fifty-five years and my teaching of medical infectious diseases, first at Marquette University Medical School and then at the Medical College of Wisconsin, between 1952 and 1990. Based on my initial training in infectious diseases, the medical literature, and my clinical experience, I have come to the conclusion that there is an epidemic of chronic Lyme disease occurring in the United States that warrants more attention than it is getting from the government and the academic medical establishment. It is hard for me to believe that the fifty-one cases of what I call the chronic Lyme disease syndrome represent a figment of my imagination. It will be up to the reader to make a decision in this regard.