If there were any doubt that that the Loudoun all-Republican Board of Supervisors has been shamelessly pandering to a very fringe special interest in its bizarre promotion of Lyme disease hysteria—and equally that it is allowing itself in return to be used by a group of unscientific practitioners trying to legitimize their use of unapproved, unproven, and dangerous (but lucrative) “therapies”—recent moves by the state and national Republican Party on the issue have settled the matter.
A fascinating new article in Mother Jones tells the story on the national level, with some fascinating quotes by our very own Michael Farris who claims that evolution is obviously nonsense, and that he understands medical issues better than the people who, say, are silly enough to think there just might be something to that evolution thing.
Meanwhile, our own Supervisor Ken “Some Call Him Ken” Reid (R-Leesburg) has just slipped into the county’s legislative agenda a ringing endorsement of the recent final report of the state Lyme Commission, chaired by our own native Lyme loonie “Dr.” Farris.
The state commission—I am sure this will come as a surprise—ignored the testimony of scientific experts but cited approvingly in its final report to the governor the testimony of “lay witnesses” who presented the following series of arguments that just happen to serve the interests of the above mentioned unscientific practitioners:
a) you can have Lyme disease even if you’ve never been bitten by a tick
b) you can have Lyme disease even if the standard, proven lab tests show you don’t have Lyme disease
c) you can have Lyme disease even if you have been treated with antibiotics for 2-3 weeks, which all the scientific evidence shows completely eradicates the disease-causing bacteria
d) you can have Lyme disease, no matter how much treatment you have had, until you decide you “feel better”
e) it is very, very bad for anyone to try to tell a practitioner that he should not prescribe unnecessary and dangerous courses of long-term antibiotics to anyone he feels like
The chairman of Loudoun’s Lyme Commission just so happens to be a physician who has a practice devoted to diagnosing Lyme disease where others have failed to and then treating patients at length with unapproved therapies, including long-term antibiotics and “hyperbaric oxygen” (he has a separate practice offering such oxygen “therapy” for a whole host of diseases, none of which is covered by insurance and none of which is approved by the FDA). As one former patient told us: “If you sneeze, he says you have Lyme disease.”
The rest of the world, as the above mentioned article makes clear, no doubt thinks Loudoun County, under its current unanimous Republican leadership, is completely off its rocker.
Far from us to disagree . . .
realloudoun 