"Jennifer Reid of the Ridgefield Lyme Disease Task Force said ..." "This is where things begin to fall apart. ... the data will be a hodge-podge of misleading and probably useless information. It’s a case of “garbage in, garbage out.”
"From a poster on the LymeNut Forum:"
"Here’s a little something from the dark side of Lymeland where everything is a conspiracy formulated by secret cabals of scientists and government officials. Fortunately, they can’t seem to keep their diabolical plots from leaking out, not to the NYT or a congressional committee, but to middle-aged mental patients who sit around on the Internet all day looking for fantasies to blame for their personal problems."
"Get off the Internet and get some therapy."
Traveling....weather permitting.
Posted by Relative Risk at 11:29 0 comments Links to this post
"I know I keep saying this, "Just when I think the denizens of Lymeland can't get any dumber....they do."
"Maybe this person is a recent immigrant with an imperfect command of written English. Or maybe he/she is just a nut. Probably the latter."
"Curiously, there’s no clamor to abandon the boot-strapped guidelines promulgated by that renegade group calling itself the “International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). Those guidelines were cobbled together by a handful of private practice physicians (almost all of whom lack training in infectious diseases) looking to justify their own expensive but ineffective treatments of patients who believe they have a persistent Lyme infection. Their own guidelines remain unsupported by RCTs, other trials, or expert opinion. Instead they seem to be based on belief, anecdote, a touch of quackery, and good old-fashioned greed.
In the end, any activists’ accusations aimed at the IDSA also must be directed at the practices of their own doctors, the LLMDs of ILADS."
"Someone on LymeNut seems to have had a brief moment of lucidity or honesty..."
"Our findings are strikingly different from those of Phillips et al, [quacks from ILADS] who reported that B. burgdorferi.."
"One of my colleagues once said of LymeNut, "reading this stuff gives me a headache." I'm feeling a little dizzy myself after reading some of the morning's sillier topics."
"There’s been some excitement over at LymeNut about a press release from Johns Hopkins."
"...push this megalomaniac right off the front page." ... "Still, Dick Blum must be in the news....even if he has to make up the news. What next? The alleged Tampon shortage? Over-priced bagels in East Coast grocery chains?"
GARY P. WORMSER, MD, FIDSA; New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY. "The schizophrenic role of the Lyme Movement also was discussed."
"Imagine all the crank calls and nutty emails she [Lola Russell] must get from people worried about ticks and mysterious Morgellons threads on their skin."
"...a howling hurricane of noisy nonsense, psuedoscience, quackery, and good old-fashioned ignorance."
Posted by Relative Risk at 03:52 0 comments Links to this post
Posted by Relative Risk at 04:03 0 comments Links to this post
07 October 2009
Bad Lawyering about Good Science
"I wonder how lawyer Lorraine Johnson of the CALDA would like it if a bunch of physicians and scientists started explaining the law to her. ... Yet she’s willing to pontificate relentlessly about medicine, immunology, and infectious diseases like she’s an expert." "I guess I understand why this woman doesn’t practice law in a courtroom; she’d be confusing defendant, witness, prosecutor, and judge."
"It’s the cheap and easy answer for charlatans and the gullible. So I’m left to wonder which one Lawyer Johnson is. Both, perhaps?"
"I think the reviewers will feel inclined to add a section on the work of Hassett and Sigal, which describes significant psychiatric co-morbidity associated with “chronic” Lyme disease. ... Insisting the Lyme Movement is not made up of crazy people, CALDA and the LDA manage to coerce a re-review of the IDSA guidelines, which results in the guidelines being changed to include a section on psychiatric co-morbidity."
"Lyme activists always have seemed to be their own worst enemy. Disorganized, antagonistic, vindictive, back-biting, fratricidal groups, conspiracy nuts, and any number of certified mental patients acting as self-appointed Movement spokespersons. Now they just may have provided the medical community with a legitimate reason for considering “chronic” Lyme disease as a psychiatric manifestation."
Factless Film
" ... and the Internet-connected activist groups who solicit money from the gullible" "... long list of well-known Lyme quacks, activists and organizations"
"... note posted on the LymeNut forum.."
"Yet this statement seems emblematic of the Internet-connected nuts who think they are plagued with a permanent infection that limits their social and financial lives to sitting in front of their computers and trolling the Internet for Lyme-related information 18 hours a day."
"They are always worrying about Internet trolls, imagining someone is hacking their computers, searching for their names, reporting their doctors to state licensing boards, and keeping tabs on everything they say and do and plan."
"Paranoia aside, there’s also the near pathological use by activists of superlatives to describe the doctors who fleece…I mean treat…them."
"...these quacks..."... "...it’s all still delusion and deceit. ... Finally, there are the lies."
"..most of the information provided on activist and quack sites is repeatedly, regularly, consistently falsified."
"Are these Lyme activists getting desperate? Now they’re paying people to attend their meetings?"
"CALDA or LDA or ILADS--well, actually they’re all the same people--are trying to rope in some naïve practitioners who don’t know much about Lyme disease or about Lyme disease activists."
"Personally, I think it would take a lot more than $500 to make the average professional sit through lectures by the likes of Stricker, Johnson, Pat Smith, Joe Burrascano, and the 80-year-old Jones. What could one possible learn from such people? How to get through a licensing board hearing? How to threaten someone with legal action? How to manipulate and intimidate local politicians? How to survive a federal funding bar? How to hide cash payments?"
"As for ILADS, it’s a bunch of quacks and crooks masquerading as a legit medical society."
"Just ask the ILADS quacks..."
"...quacks like [Ann] Corson..."
"Well, the greed of these so-called “Lyme Literate“ physicians and the mental illness affecting people who think they have a chronic--if not permanent--infection will do that."
"Mr. Kocurek is in no position to comment on the professional literature. He’s an amateur with an opinion based on hope and hype and misguided belief. It’s him, his fellow “patients” and their doctors who have a dogma and an agenda, and a distain for science and evidence."
"...Christ, I wish it could--but that‘s no reason to embrace quackery and witchcraft."
"What’s wrong with these people (mentally)...?"
"Most of the activist/patient groups are committed to a belief in chronic B. burgdorferi infections and the belief that all of their physical and emotional problems are the result of that chronic infection."
"Well, that’s probably because the things portrayed in his propaganda film bear no resemblance to the common bacterial infection called Lyme disease."
"As for “medical fraud,” well, there’s plenty of that among the private practice quacks who prey on people who think they have “chronic” Lyme disease."
"Wilson sounds like a idiot."
"The only people getting rich from Lyme disease are the so-called “Lyme Literate MDs” heroically portrayed in Wilson’s cinematic commercial for their services. And maybe Wilson myself. His film seems to be advertised on the web sites of most Lyme activists and predatory quacks."
"Below is a list of conference “faculty” for an upcoming meeting of the ILADS, a group of like-minded quacks preying on people who think they have a chronic, incurable bacteria infection otherwise know to the saner world as Lyme disease. If the roof of the conference room was to fall in, it would put an end to a large amount of quackery in the U.S., save many people from financial ruin, and lessen the workload of numerous state medical licensing boards."
"... and not because they’re treating Lyme disease, but because they’re just bad doctors."
"Regrettably, they are probably taking financial advantage of the situation."
"So what do they talk about year after year? Bill padding? How to hide cash payments? Property values in the Caribbean? How to get your patients to pay your legal fees through Internet-solicited defense funds? I don’t know. It might be interesting to attend some of this conference, but I’m afraid my head would explode.
"The Internet is choke-full of middle-aged, white women sitting online at home convinced they have an incurable infection that robs them of the ability to do anything but sit at home online complaining about their incurable infection and the vast conspiracy of insurance companies and academic researchers who are keeping them from appropriate treatment."
Sept 14, 2009
Survey Says....
“Interestingly, her usual pamphleteering partner, Ralph--What a bigger penis--Stricker, also has some difficulties with evidence as indicated by an earlier NIH finding …
26 August 2009
“Posted on the wackjob website…”
17 August 2009
Panel hears conflicting views on Lyme disease treatment
“… all those foolish patient/fan/activists. … which a few practitioners, diagnostic labs, and home infusion companies hope to continue to make millions of dollars pumping expensive antibiotics (or more likely cheap saline) into gullible hypochondriacs.”
16 August 2009
“EASTON- With U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., signing on to support a national Lyme Disease bill, all of Maryland's representatives are now on board. The legislation is aimed at helping to provide education about the disease, fund research for a better testing method and create an advisory committee. A similar bill introduced last session also had the support of all Maryland's lawmakers, but it did not make it to the floor for a vote.
"We've been trying for years to get a bill passed," said Lucy Barnes, director of the Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland. "It's very unusual to have them all signed on to co-sponsor a bill."
Sounds like it’s time to update some letters to Maryland’s Congressional Reps and Senators. I know these congressional sign-ons are generally meaningless, especially now, in the midst of a financial crisis and a huge struggle over healthcare. Still, it’s best not to let these nuts have the last word. Speaking of nuts, this local newspaper article reads like it was dictated by Lucy Barnes… Her juvenile online comments about scientists and academic physicians, and her online lectures about Lyme disease suggest she’s a horribly ignorant and ill-mannered 13-year-old hillbilly, or maybe just a liar. Is it possible to be both?”
11 August 2009
“Buzz Aldrin, sick of the conspiracy nuts who kept insisting his walk on the moon was faked, finally hauled off and punched one of these poor fools in the face. No doubt it was more effective—not to mention satisfying—than any reasoned argument could have been. Such people simply are beyond the reach of reason. Likewise the Lyme conspiracy nuts who think a common bacterial infection is the work of some vast government-insurance plot. Buzz is probably too busy to stop by and punch out these nuts. Too bad, because the fluoride and other mind-control substances in the national water supplies don’t seem to be working very well.”
10 August 2009
Alternative History
“… a Democratic state attorney general and some middle-aged ladies from California and New Jersey. … And they had one: Richard Blumenthal—not a guy with “vision and Intestinal fortitude” as Lorraine suggests, but rather a megalomaniac and TV-camera addict who already had an unhealthy obsession with Lyme disease.”
06 August 2009
“Happy and humbled? Please. What rot. I can’t imagine how this crude, celluloid propaganda has affected anyone’s life, except perhaps to make more sensible viewers wonder: “Is this damned thing ever going to end?” … these patient/activists are nuts—as if that wasn’t evident from some the presentations and documentation sent to the review panel—and these LLMDs and ILADS guys are charlatans and quacks, and are a general threat to the health and wealth of their patients. … he’s just as delusional as the chronic Lyme activists.”
30 July 2009
“… Lorraine Johnson (JD, MBA) and her gaggle of quack MD’s got their respective degrees…”
22 July 2009
We lost a $100M, but here’s the good news….
“The committee bill--which the House could easily toss into a trash can this year--merely “urges” the NIH to do something. Moreover, it says a “scientific” conference should represent the broad spectrum of “scientific” views, not the wacky opinions of charlatans and naïve patients.”
14 July 2009
“Those wacky Lyme activists … must have been irritated by the nutty denouncements—but then who isn’t irritated by these unreasonable conspiracy nuts—“
13 July 2009
“I don’t understand where these so-called LLMDs come up with this stuff. Are they morons or just liars?”
10 July 2009
“… marred by the call-in lunacy of Kathleen, a well-known Lyme nutcase …
So why do activists compulsively lie about this important fact? … I don’t know if Willy [Burgdorfer] actually said that, but it’s helpful to remember that he’s an 80-year-old retired PhD and his MD is entirely honorary … a call-in nutjob… Still, the lies continue.”
09 July 2009
“But that’s part of the art of propaganda: lies and disinformation must be regularly repeated. How does having an NIH grant … Wilson turns out to be just another anti-science, anti-expert conspiracy theorist. He’s helping to spread pseudoscience. He’s promoting whacky alternative medicine and some of its practitioners. He’s another Oprah or Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield with a camera.”
26 June 2009
“A colleague sent this out the other day:
I just received this tragic news regarding Dr. Ed Masters. Ed was a true pioneer who pursued the path of truth with a fervor that was fueled by his dedication to both his patients and the advancement of medicine and science. He will be truly missed by all who knew him, both personally and professionally.
One thing I won’t miss though are the phone calls from him. It was nearly impossible to get him off the line or get a word in edge-wise. Mail wasn’t much better: big thick packets of typed pages and lots of photos of EM rashes. He leaves behind an infection named after him though, in fact, the naming was both accidental and intended more as a joke than an accolade.”
21 June 2009
“Well, this should encourage a few quacks and charlatans to move to Connecticut. Let’s hope a few of these lawyers follow in hot pursuit.”
07 June 2009
“Rounding out the entertainment is Raphael-do you need a larger penis-Stricker…
The only thing missing is popcorn and a few minutes of Blumenthal preening before the webcams.”
30 May 2009
Who's the Gov: Rell or Blumenthal?
“Aside from encouraging some quacks to move to Connecticut… Of course, the governor may not sign the bill. She still wants to run in 2010.”
13 May 09
Sound and Fury becomes the Fast and the Furious
“The panel lacks any Lyme quacks or activists so the activists are angry, alarmed, and probably depressed.”
12 May 2009
“But just for fun—and because it’s important to call out dishonest people… But many of them are worthless, being from well-known quacks, non-peer-reviewed presentations and abstracts, public testimony, and the websites of Lyme activist organizations. Hardly reliable, objective sources of data…. Do they actually believe this crap?! And, of course, it begs the question of why then would these Lyme quacks …”
11 May 2009
“Well, it looks like the LDF has risen from the dead—or at least from Karen Forschner’s basement… There were annual photo-op rallies on Capital Hill, a faked award ceremony at NIH (“It's just a stupid Lucite plaque.'')… After eight years of Bush secrecy, and political hacks like George Deutsch, Bill Steiger and Julie MacDonald …
So, yes, I think the new Administration, the new congressional committee chairs, the new OSTP staff, science advisors such as former NIH Director Harold Varmus and incoming FDA Administrator Peggy Hamburg are very aware of the “serious conflicts and scientific misstatements” characteristic of Lyme activists and their quack physicians.”
4 May 2009
Lies, Distortions, and Wishful Thinking
“No, I think Blum [Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, CT] has demonstrated that he’s just another crooked pol … He’s a media-addicted clown who will temporarily pursue any cause for a few minutes of television time. He’s a bad politician and a bad lawyer.”
08 May 2009
Lies, Damn Lies, and No References
The fact sheet I’m referring to is from the LymeNet forum and was apparently cobbled together by one Lucy Barnes… I’m not going to go over this pile of manure line by line and lie by lie, but I will highlight a few of the more absurd points made by this online agitator.
03 May 2009
“… ILADS—the self-help group of Lyme quacks… Wow. Marylanders must be the dumbest people in the U.S. So who’s the audience for this pathetic propaganda?”
29 April 2009
“Anyway, I assumed this was the work of a complete idiot who had momentary access to his mom’s computer until I followed a HTML link back to the original source of this intellectual wreckage. … Why would someone spend time writing gibberish? Well, maybe because they’re morons, or because they’re con artists without much knowledge of science and medicine. … Or maybe they just want to sell stuff to foolish people.”
23 April 2009
Not Ready For Prime Time Anytime Soon
“…as a matter of public health and public education, mention a horrible little piece of poisonous propaganda… … this piece of disease porn… Dirt, greed and politics can be found among the advocacy groups and LLMDs … It can be found among the LLMDs who sit on Lyme advisory boards and troll for patients at advocacy meetings.”
20 April 2009
Research on a (biased) shoestring
“Evidently, these projects have to be supported by biased advocates because they cannot survive peer-review and attract funds from the CDC or NIH.”
16 April 2009
Biotech firm takes $100K from Lyme Activists
“It’s the activists who are stuck in an iron box of hopeless ideology and quackery.”
14 April 2009
“We need more common sense, reality-based commentary about infectious diseases on the Internet, which right now seems very much like a medium designed specifically for rumors, myths, lies, conspiracy theories, and the rants of the mentally ill.”
31 March 2009
“… I wish Volkman had spent some time pointing out those kinds of conflicts among Lyme advocacy organizations, A.G. Blumenthal, Lyme specialty labs, and the many cash-and-carry private practice physicians who make a nice living off of the ignorant, the gullible, and the desperate.”
27 March 2009
Ct. Dems show they can ignore science just as well as Bush
“I guess it could be called the "Quack Protection Act" or maybe the "Imaginary Infections Act of Connecticut."
27 March 2009
“Connecticut is a state endemic for Lyme disease, Lyme activists, Lyme quacks, and foolish local politicians willing to take up the banner of "chronic" Lyme disease on behalf of their deluded, but voting, constituents. It's a state with a near perfect mixture of bad medicine and bad politics.”