Posted on 05/12/2006 6:44:12 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
If diseases like AIDS and bird flu scare you, wait until you hear what's next. Doctors are trying to find out what is causing a bizarre and mysterious infection that's surfaced in South Texas.
Morgellons disease is not yet known to kill, but if you were to get it, you might wish you were dead, as the symptoms are horrible.
"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients.
Patients get lesions that never heal.
"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.
Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.
"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.
While all of this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in South Texas.
"It really has the makings of a horror movie in every way," Savely said.
While Savely sees this as a legitimate disease, there are many doctors who simply refuse to acknowledge it exists, because of the bizarre symptoms patients are diagnosed as delusional.
"Believe me, if I just randomly saw one of these patients in my office, I would think they were crazy too," Savely said. "But after you've heard the story of over 100 (patients) and they're all — down to the most minute detail — saying the exact same thing, that becomes quite impressive."
Travis Wilson developed Morgellons just over a year ago. He called his mother in to see a fiber coming out of a lesion.
"It looked like a piece of spaghetti was sticking out about a quarter to an eighth of an inch long and it was sticking out of his chest," Lisa Wilson said. "I tried to pull it as hard as I could out and I could not pull it out."
The Wilson's spent $14,000 after insurance last year on doctors and medicine.
"Most of them are antibiotics. He was on Tamadone for pain. Viltricide, this was an anti-parasitic. This was to try and protect his skin because of all the lesions and stuff," Lisa said.
However, nothing worked, and 23-year-old Travis could no longer take it.
"I knew he was going to kill himself, and there was nothing I could do to stop him," Lisa Wilson said.
Just two weeks ago, Travis took his life.
Stephanie Bailey developed the lesions four-and-a-half years ago.
"The lesions come up, and then these fuzzy things like spores come out," she said.
She also has the crawling sensation.
"You just want to get it out of you," Bailey said.
She has no idea what caused the disease, and nothing has worked to clear it up.
"They (doctors) told me I was just doing this to myself, that I was nuts. So basically I stopped going to doctors because I was afraid they were going to lock me up," Bailey said.
Harriett Bishop has battled Morgellons for 12 years. After a year on antibiotics, her hands have nearly cleared up. On the day, we visited her she only had one lesion and she extracted this fiber from it.
"You want to get these things out to relieve the pain, and that's why you pull and then you can see the fibers there, and the tentacles are there, and there are millions of them," Bishop said.
So far, pathologists have failed to find any infection in the fibers pulled from lesions.
"Clearly something is physically happening here," said Dr. Randy Wymore, a researcher at the Morgellons Research Foundation at Oklahoma State University's Center for Health Sciences.
Wymore examines the fibers, scabs and other samples from Morgellon's patients to try and find the disease's cause.
"These fibers don't look like common environmental fibers," he said.
The goal at OSU is to scientifically find out what is going on. Until then, patients and doctors struggle with this mysterious and bizarre infection. Thus far, the only treatment that has showed some success is an antibiotic.
"It sounds a little like a parasite, like a fungal infection, like a bacterial infection, but it never quite fits all the criteria of any known pathogen," Savely said
No one knows how Morgellans is contracted, but it does not appear to be contagious. The states with the highest number of cases are Texas, California and Florida.
The only connection found so far is that more than half of the Morgellons patients are also diagnosed with Lyme disease.
For more information on Morgellons, visit the research foundation's Web site at www.morgellons.org.
Instead you have someone who says they repeatedly went to doctors, the doctors said they were crazy, so they stopped going. A crawling sensation I can understand, but not an observable physical phenomenon.
Very interesting. Never heard of it. Thanks to all contributors to this thread. BTTT!
Instead you have someone who says they repeatedly went to doctors, the doctors said they were crazy, so they stopped going.
From what I have seen, very few doctors are going to spend time on a problematical and highly questioned malady when they can be raking it in hand over fist on sniffles and skinned knees.
Unfortunately, most of the doctors I have run across do not want challenges, they are quite content to tell someone something is just their imagination rather than do the work to find out what the problem is. It is as if: they cannot find the problem, so no problem can exist, therefore, the patient is making it up.
Once that gets in your chart, the next doctor reviews the chart and says "Sure, you have a problem.", winks at the nurse, and you are wasting your time. (FWIW, No, I do not have this problem, my experience was with something else.)
Maybe some of the fibers are lint, maybe some are not. I can't say I am an expert on fibers of any nature, but the micrographs on the website look an awful lot like some sort of critter spine (pointy projection, not backbone) to me.
Part of the job (any kind of detective work) is to separate the noise from the signal, no matter what you are trying to figure out.
Two things:
First, let me remind you that AIDS was not immediately recognized, either. It was a new disease.
Second, the last item you posted, having seen numerous physicians to no avail, is self-fulfilling prophecy of the nonrecognition. Anathema to diagnosis. Redundant. Of course, if the physician can't diagnose, the patient is the one with 'psychological illness.'
I hope you never know the agony of dermatitis NOS. My husband has it and if anyone were to call him a hypochondriac I'd be at them with both barrels.
I didn't write the article so you are mad at the wrong person. And I hope I never have whatever you said, either.
I'm not mad at anyone. I live in San Antonio and I think it was indelicate for Deborah Daniels to say "you may wish you were dead" when she was preparing to tell us about the 23-yr-old who took his life over this strange stuff.
We're told that there is a stress-related eczema that can last up to five years and then goes away. We're almost halfway through it.
"Horrors! The world is crumbling before our very eyes! Truly this is the End of Days. </sarcasm>"
And if you think it's bad now, just wait til that DaVinci Code movie opens. Then you'll see some real wrath.
I was being sarcastic.
I'm glad. I've seen comments here that indicated the posters couldn't get past the hack writing...and others who were 'incensed' by the gall it implies.
Personally, I can't wait to see it! I love Tom Hanks!
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