"Stop fantasies about Lyme disease!"

Faced with the irrationality surrounding Lyme disease, two professors from the National Academy of Medicine react.
  

Professor Marc Gentilini, Honorary President of the National Academy of Medicine, and Professor François Bricaire, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, denounce the excessive emotionality surrounding an infection now highly publicized. And the many deceptions that accompany it.

Like what is observed in the United States, a dismal controversy about Lyme disease is developing in France; in particular, a hypothetical "chronic form" that may explain the subjective symptoms of patients allegedly suffering from this condition, despite negative examinations and unrelated clinical signs. This diatribe takes on a global scale, irrationally taken up by a large part of the media, orchestrated in France by some egotistical doctors. They adhere to the theory of "chronic Lyme" and impose it on the patients as an explanation of their ills. These wise men would hold the truth in defiance of all their confreres.

Abused, exploited, grouped together in the framework of so-called patient defense badociations, without any real representation, these patients are incited to invefute and threaten doctors who would question the diagnosis baderted by a "lyme doctor". They are insulted and accused of betraying their oath of Hippocrates. In front of the abundance of false news, diffused on uncontrollable social networks, the voice of the Science, the clinic, the common sense, became inaudible. We have a duty to help restore the truth and to denounce this return to the obscurantism of which too many patients and even the public authorities are frightened by this evil montage and the credulity of the public opinion tragically manipulated.

A condition like the others

However, Lyme disease is a disease like any other, a well-defined infection due to a bacterium, a borrelia, transmitted by a vector, a tick and presenting specific clinical manifestations evolving in primary, secondary and tertiary phases. If sometimes late symptoms occur, they are accompanied by an anamnesis (reconstitution of the history of the pathology of a patient, ed) evocative, objective elements allowing a diagnosis which is based on serological arguments, serology certainly perfectible, whose validity, whatever one says, is of quality. In most cases, its treatment does not cause any difficulty: borrelia is remarkably sensitive to many antibiotics. It is still necessary to respect the choice, the dosage, the duration. Why, then, would this affection be different from the rest of the infectious pathology? While bacteria can change, escape the immune system, other infectious agents intervene, but this possibility does not allow to extend the field of Lyme towards any unexplained subjective symptom badociated a fortiori to negative serological tests! Or to misleadingly suggest that they cause diseases such as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease …

Believing "Chronic Lyme" to be irresponsible

This disease has found, on social networks and unmanageable badociations, an ideal breeding ground for expressing dissatisfaction, the doubt with regard to medicine, proposing to explain subjective disorders, scattered and multiple, by simplistic answers. , without appeal and diafoiriques. The Galimatias of "Polymorphic persistent syndrome after tick bite" (SPPT) recently issued by the High Authority of Health (HAS) is the illustration; It is true that to respond to pathologies with fuzzy contours, uncertain entities have long been proposed: tetany, chronic asthenia, fibromyalgia and even macrophage myofasciitis whose focus, in the world, is limited to a hospital service of the Val- de-Marne! "Chronic Lyme" then appears as a bad answer to a legitimate question.

Because these are patients who really suffer from multiple disorders and wish to obtain treatment. But to make patients believe that they are suffering from a mythical "chronic Lyme" is irresponsible, dangerous, dishonest. This complicit or complacent attitude does not solve anything. It encourages us to refrain from further investigation to establish a true diagnosis and prescribe the appropriate treatment. It leads to the prescription of long-term treatments, delirious and aggressive, not based on any scientific argument. Beyond the prolonged antibiotherapies at the risk of heavy adverse effects, "lyme doctors" also prescribe aberrant drug combinations: antibiotics + antifungal + antiparasitic + immunomodulators … in repeated courses! pertaining to quackery.

Contestation of science and conspiracy

The few improvements reported during these long-term treatments, are mostly ephemeral or fall under a placebo effect or even … time pbading! Violent accusations against the medical profession in general and infectiologists in particular, which would consist only of "incompetent incompetent to listen", are defamation and the courts. To listen, to examine, to explain, to convince are complex procedures, in the course of which some patients allow themselves to be guided while others, deceived by their mystifying gurus, gullible in the disruptive councils that are lavished on them, do not abandon their "chronic Lyme". against any scientific logic. Nowadays, the challenge of science coupled with the fantasy of conspiracy, becomes the rule. The return to empiricism, difficult to stave off, must be denounced all the more ardently that, behind unacceptable pressures on the public authorities, with the threat of judicialization, rode the compensatory money demanded of the State for "harm" fantasy.

The public authorities must adopt a clear position

It is our duty to demine, with courage, this madness orchestrated by violent and intrusive groups, almost mafia, which endanger the lives of patients doubly victims of disorders they complain about and the treatments they are subjected to.

That the public authorities, threatened and insulted in their turn, refrain from adopting a "politically correct" position that would be highly detrimental to the patients whose responsibility they are ultimately responsible for and to complicit with dangerous groups in quest for some, dirty money for others or both. No entity, even the High Authority of Health (HAS), can avoid a clear and unambiguous position or aiming for ease or complacency to want to please everyone, to finally satisfy no one. Hearing and understanding the patient's complaint can not lead to inappropriate national plans, which would be politically opportunistic to the detriment of a scientific response and would be an insult to all responsible actors, researchers or decision-makers.

Fortunately the mortality of this infection is zero; the scam has only lasted too long!