C hronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again is a long-awaited book by Dr. Steven Phillips and Dana Parish. The authors, a prominent Lyme doctor and a singer/songwriter/advocate who used to be his patient, are well known in the Lyme community. Given their connections with Lyme, it’s initially curious that their book’s title doesn’t mention Lyme disease. But that omission is explained early on. In their text, Phillips and Parish use the term “Lyme+” for the dizzying constellation of microbes that can result in a wide variety of persistent symptoms and autoimmune conditions. Lyme disease by itself may be only one part of the complex picture.
Chronic is divided into two sections. The first part, “The Root,” debunks commonly held myths about Lyme+ and shows how mainstream medicine has so often gotten its facts wrong. The second part, “The Remedy,” offers practical advice on how to get properly diagnosed and discusses an assortment of treatments that may be useful.
The following excerpt is taken from the chapter titled, “The Myths That Get in the Way.” (This passage includes two myths. The chapter explores many more.)
MYTH:
Long-term antibiotic therapy for Lyme is an unproven treatment that’s highly dangerous.
FACT:
Of course, we want to minimize risks to patients from treatments and maximize benefits. Therapies for most serious diseases can have serious side effects, but the risk of fatality from long-term antibiotic therapy is quite low. Far more deaths have been caused by Lyme+ than by its treatment. The risk of fatal outcomes in the treatment of inflammatory diseases with immunosuppressive agents, and cancer with chemotherapy, is far higher than for antibiotic therapy, but the difference in those diseases is that they are accepted by the CDC as legitimate, therefore the risk is deemed justifiable.
But high rates of treatment failures using short-term antibiotic therapy are well documented in the medical literature. It has been clearly demonstrated in study after study that short-term antibiotics are simply not effective in many cases. This, coupled with published research proving bacterial persistence despite short-term antibiotics, makes the case for longer treatments until better treatments come along…..Join or login below to continue reading.
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