Morgellons
Morgellons Articles
01 August 2010
This nursing journal must be hard up for insightful commentary. Why else would they give Ginger Savely a stump from which to hawk her quackery?
Having been driven out of Texas for her practice of pumping “chronic” Lyme patients full of antibiotics, she’s moved to California to help former penis enlargement expert Ralph Stricker pump antibiotics into people complaining of “chronic” Lyme disease. Since then, they’ve both discovered an online community of psychiatric patients suffering from delusional parasitosis who have renamed their disorder, Morgellons disease. Naturally, a foundation has sprung up to organize these patients, reinforce their delusions, and take their money. Similarly, various quacks have appeared to treat them with expensive antibiotics, insisting that these patients have mysterious infections (probably related to Lyme disease, they claim) and not delusions or the self-inflected wounds of those delusions.
So Nurse Savely’s commentary offers up some intellectual chestnuts from Thomas Khun about paradigm shifts and William Osler about bedside medicine in order to suggest 1) she’s well read, and 2) responsible physicians are intellectually stuck in the mud when it comes to Morgellons disease. Without offering a scrape of evidence in support of her claims she writes:
Delusions of parasitosis should be re-examined as a valid psychiatric phenomenon. Its victims have no prior history of psychiatric disorders, the onset often follows an immune suppressing event, it occurs in children and in entire families, it is more prevalent in certain parts of the country, and its onset is seasonal. Furthermore, it appears to be increasing in incidence. One would suspect an infection rather than a psychosis with this epidemiological picture.
Well, yes, delusion parasitosis is a real disease. A psychiatric disease. Moreover, the suggestion that it is rare is at odds with actual specialists in dermatology and psychiatry. For example:
J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol. 2007 Apr;21(4):462-5.
Delusional parasitosis in dermatological practice.
Szepietowski JC, Salomon J, H
During the whole working period the majority of dermatologists participating in the survey (84.7%) had seen at least one patient with DP in their practice.
DP is a quite common disorder, however not all dermatologists are sufficiently prepared to treat it. There is an urgent need for training on the dermatological approach to psychodermatoses.
Clin Exp Dermatol. 2010 Mar;35(2):120-5. Epub 2009 Oct 23.
Psychiatric treatments in dermatology: an update.
Sambhi R, Lepping P.
Delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation. This is a psychotic disorder in which the patient has a fixed and false belief that their body and/or their accommodation is infested with parasites, despite there being no objective evidence for this.
[snip]
Patients with delusional parasitosis often lack insight and will not see a psychiatrist, which makes a careful discussion about ways to relieve distress by using antipsychotics paramount. It will often be up to the dermatologist to start and monitor treatment because of the patients' refusal to engage with psychiatric or liaison services. Giving medication to 'relieve distress' can be a way to commence psychotropic medication in an ethical way to a patient who lacks insight.
Dermatitis artefacta. This is a form of factitious disorder, in which the patient presents with self-inflicted cutaneous lesions which the patient typically denies having induced. It is more common in females than males (3 : 1–20 : 1).
So without any obvious training in psychiatry or infectious diseases Savely is merrily providing antibiotics to people in need of far more serious care. According to a website called Morgellons Watch she was charging $500 for treatment. Now in California with access to Stricker’s pool of “chronic” Lyme disease patients (said to number 1,800) she’s probably making a killing. And maybe she’ll eventually kill someone.
Until then, she and Stricker are busy doing some bad research on Morgellons. Presumably to make themselves look like legit investigators and to provide the data (however cooked) to justify their practices.
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Posted by Relative Risk at 13:24 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Morgellons, Stricker
14 May 2010
From the White Coat Underground, PalMD kicks some Stricker and Savely ass over Morgellons and just plain bad, bad science.
Raphael Stricker is a disgraced hematologist who after losing his career to data manipulation took up the chronic Lyme disease banner. He is part of ILADS, which has been demanding that actual experts shut up and get out of the way so they can continue their evidence-free treatment of supposed chronic Lyme disease. Savely has written earlier crappy articles about morgellons. She is a nurse practitioner who "treats" people with "chronic Lyme disease" and morgellons.
[Snip, but check out the photos.]
I can't go on much longer, because my brain hurts, but one of the most remarkable "findings" is this:
Sixty-four (52.5%) of the subjects had positive Lyme tests by Western blot. Another 44.3% (n = 54) were highly suspect for Lyme disease based on the presence of 5/7 of the defined criteria for a Lyme diagnosis, as outlined in the Materials and methods section. These results imply that 96.8% of the sample may have been infected with B burgdorferi [the organism that causes Lyme disease]
Fascinating. In 2008 there were 74 cases of Lyme disease reported in the entire state of California, and yet somehow, one nurse practitioner in San Francisco managed to find 64 cases in a brief period of time. Remarkable.
This article is so remarkably bad it's almost like they were trying to parody science. Please...don't try any harder.
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Posted by Relative Risk at 17:46 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Morgellons, Quackery, Stricker
21 March 2010
Oh my, next week in Texas the Morgellonites are meeting to discuss their mysterious fibers (does bellybutton lint count?), scabs and other symptoms. How creepy would it be to sit in a hotel room surround by people with self-inflicted scabs and sores as they compare plastic bags full of fibers they’ve pull off of themselves.Delusional parasitosis in mass. So the deluded will be gathering to be fleeced and lectured to by the following Morgellons experts, some of whom are, oddly enough, also “chronic” Lyme disease experts, or perhaps just as nutty as the patients attending this thing. Here’s the cast of characters to date:Ginger Savely, DNPSan Francisco, CADr. Savely has medically managed over 1000 Lyme and other tick borne disease patients and over 300 Morgellons patients in her practice.“Medically managed’? Not cured? I’m not surprised. If you don’t know what the patient has and you don’t know what you’re doing, the chances of a positive outcome are greatly diminished. So Savely got herself run out of Texas for her practice and now works with the clown below in S.F.Raphael B. Stricker, M.D.San Francisco, CA
Board of Directors ILADS, International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society
Board of Directors CALDA, California Lyme Disease Association. Enough has been said about this opportunistic quack.
Amelia M. Withington, MD
Chester, PA
Attending Psychiatrist at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Chester, PA.
A psychiatrist. This is probably the only person who could be of any help to the unfortunate patients who come to these gatherings.
Randy S. Wymore, Ph.D.
Tulsa, O K
Director, Center for the Investigation of Morgellons Disease; Associate Professor of Pharmacology & Physiology Oklahoma State University, Center for Health Sciences.
Does OSU know what this guy is doing with their name? It’s bad enough that the University has the word ‘Oklahoma’ in their name, but to throw in a fake center for a fake disease is doubly embarrassing.
Neelam Uppal, M.D.
Pinellas, FL.
Dr. Neelam Uppall maintains a private practice in Infectious Disease in Pinellas, FL. She attended medical school at the Christian Medical College in India. I know this place; it’s in Vellore, just west of Chennai. Shouldn’t she have graduated with a M.B.B.S. instead of a M.D.?
David Gibbs, MS, CDRP
Austin, TX
Social Security Specialist, Disability Claims Professionals of Texas Experienced and successful disability representation for Morgellons and Lyme Disease. I’ll bet this guy gets mobbed for advice. Half the online Lymees seem desperately interested in getting onto the disability rolls and start collecting a check.
In the meantime, the sane world is just going to have to wait for the CDC to conclude their study (forced on them by Congress) of this Internet version of the well-known delusional parasitosis. Not that the CDC conclusions will matter to the Morgellonites.
“Please do not assume that the patient's problem is purely psychological based on this propensity.” From a form letter written by Wymore and intended for patients to hand to their very skeptical primary care physicians.
Posted by Relative Risk at 13:33 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Morgellons, Stricker
19 September 2009
02 September 2009
New Scientist magazine had an interesting article on 13 things that don’t make sense (to scientists). Of course, we’re not that smart so there are plenty of things that don’t yet make sense to us. NS chose 13 of them. Then they tossed in 13 more. One of them being Morgellons. Here’s a couple of quotes:
“In the internet age, such provocative delusions can spread easily, according to a letter published this year in the journal Psychosomatics (vol 50, p 90). Morgellons is an internet meme, say Andrew Lustig and his colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. "With widespread reports dating back only about three years, Morgellons has seen explosive growth for a concept dormant for more than 300 years," they say.”
And from the Pyschosomatics journal, here’s a few more quotes:
Morgellons Disease as Internet Meme.
The recent success of the Morgellons-disease meme is, in part, explained by the fact that the Morgellons label resonates with symptomatic individuals. In one person’s words: "I felt so relieved. I found all these people talking about the same thing I was." Accordingly, Morgellons disease has been considered a rapport-enhancing term in clinical medicine. The dermatology literature indicates that Morgellons disease is likely the equivalent of "delusional parasitosis," a psychiatric illness in which patients erroneously believe that their skin is infested with parasites. This competing conventional meme has been unpopular among individuals identifying themselves as having Morgellons disease.
For Morgellons disease, most information available to patients exists on the Internet; thus, the World Wide Web is a second important contributor to the proliferation of the Morgellons moniker. With widespread reports dating back only about 3 years, Morgellons has seen explosive growth for a concept dormant for more than 300 years.
This is one of the many problems with the Internet: it brings together the mentally ill and the emotionally disturbed and re-enforces their destructive behaviors and beliefs. And it’s contagious; pulling in other susceptible individuals, adding to the misguided and confused population, and providing additional behavioral re-enforcements. What’s the cure? Maybe taxing Internet usage at a fairly painful level and forcing people to seek real therapies in the real world?
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Posted by Relative Risk at 06:06 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Internet, Morgellons
15 April 2009
Sadly, a group of delusional patients got together recently to re-enforce their delusions of a mysterious infection (Morgellons) and allow themselves to be preyed upon by a couple of quacks who believe enough money and antibiotics can cure anything.
The Texas-based Oak Hill Gazette reported on the meeting (I’m not providing a link to the meeting or the foundation that sponsored it.) Some excerpts from the paper’s story are below.
Casey, like many others at the conference, credits Ginger Savely, DNP, a nurse practitioner famous for treating the controversial Morgellons and Chronic Lyme diseases, for finally showing her respect and compassion, and for giving her treatment that she says has reduced the number of lesions and the severity of her pain and itching.
Savely, who has a PHD in nursing, is practically worshipped in Morgellons and Lyme circles. She gave two lectures at the conference, one in which she described case studies of various Morgellons patients she has treated, and another discussing treatment options for the disease.
Not only is Chronic Lyme real, Savely maintains, but it has a strong association with Morgellons. She discovered the connection while treating Chronic Lyme patients in her practice in Austin. She found that approximately 10 percent of her chronic Lyme patients had the fibers, lesions and skin-crawling sensations characteristic of Morgellons. As news of the Morgellons phenomenon spread over the Internet, she started hearing from more patients who came to her for Morgellons treatment. She says overall, about 95 percent of Morgellons patients she has treated are co-infected with Lyme disease.
Where’s the data for any of those comments and conclusions? Should we expect to see it published in any peer-reviewed journals in the near future?
And this is what really upsets many in the mainstream medical community. They criticize her for prescribing heavy doses of a variety of medications for extended periods, outside the normal medical guidelines, when she doesn't even know what she is attacking or which of her treatments will work.
She was forced to leave the state of Texas when the medical board put pressure on her sponsoring physician and she could find no other Austin physician to work with. She now practices in San Francisco, California where the laws governing medical treatment are more liberal.
But other researchers are also looking into the cause. One such researcher who spoke at the conference is Dr. Raphael Stricker, MD, a clinician who, like Savely, treats Chronic Lyme and Morgellons patients in California. Morgellons skeptics dismiss Stricker's research because he was fired from the University of California in 1990 for allegedly suppressing data in a 1985 research paper on AIDS that would have contradicted his hypothesis.
[Note: Stricker and Savely, along with a couple of other Lyme Quacks serve on the board of the Morgellons Research Foundation where they no doubt troll for more deluded patients.]
Stricker presented research he conducted along with Savely and Vitaly Citovsky, Ph.D of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in which they tested lesions from seven Morgellons patients as well as biopsied skin samples from a healthy control population. They found agrobacterium in all seven Morgellons patients and none was found in the control group.
Unless you’re a potted plant—and I’m guessing many of these Morgellons patients are—there’s little chance of being bothered by common agrobacteria. Some species of Argobacterium have caused rare catheter-related bacteremias among geriatric and oncologic patients, but nothing like the self-exacerbated lesions seen among otherwise healthy patients suffering from delusional parasitosis.
Posted by Relative Risk at 16:20 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Morgellons, Stricker
04 April 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009Austin, TX
Melinda Crawley of Ringgold, Ga., came down with itchy sores on her face and scalp in 2006. Her eyes were inflamed, and then the oddest thing happened. She wiped her face with a white cloth, she said, and burgundy-colored threads came off of her skin. Crawley, 66, said she and her husband, Larry, 69, who has sores all over his body, discovered they have Morgellons Disease, a phenomenon that some mainstream doctors question the existence of and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating.
[CDC is investigating because Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) got sick of hearing about mysterious threads and sores from her disturbed constituents and so ordered the CDC to waste time and money looking into it.]
The ailment is described as a mysterious skin disease in which fibers protrude from sores and patients report other symptoms ranging from fatigue to mental fog.
Morgellons is the focus of an all-day conference in Austin Saturday for patients, researchers and others who are interested in the disease. This second annual scientific/medical conference on Morgellons is free but a $25 donation is suggested, said Crawley, media coordinator for the…..conference’s nonprofit sponsor.
It will feature key researchers studying Morgellons Disease, including Randy S. Wymore at the Center for Investigation of Morgellons at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. According to the school’s Web site, Wymore, an assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology, “is assuring people with the disease that they are notdelusional, as some have accused.”
[What’s the basis for his assurance? Is he an infectious disease expert? A psychiatrist? No, he’s a pharmacy prof. trying to kill his chances of ever getting tenure by associating himself with an Internet-created phenomenon.]
The disorder is sometimes managed like chronic Lyme disease, Crawley said. Patients with persistent Lyme disease say they, too, have problems being diagnosed and receiving treatment from mainstream doctors who question the validity of their illness.
[Well, that’s appropriate: a fake disease being managed like another fake disease. Even more appropriate, some of the same clowns who are pumping antibiotics into “chronic” Lyme patients and advising Lyme advocacy groups (Stricker, Schaller, Savely, etc.) are also pumping antibiotics into Morgellons patients and advising Morgellons advocacy groups.]
Posted by Relative Risk at 08:50 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Internet, Morgellons
20 January 2008
Today’s Washington Post has a long article about the online delusion called Morgellon’s Disease. (There’s an excerpt below.) Morgellons is in the press these days because enough congressmen were badgered by delusional constituents that they finally asked the CDC to look into the matter. A telecon Q&A with reporters a couple of days ago resulted in numerous weekend articles about Morgellons.
The Post article doesn’t cover any new ground, but it’s description of several middle-aged female Morgellons patients does re-enforce the idea that this an Internet-based form of Delusional Parasitosis.
And, of course, some of the usual suspects associated with quackery and mysterious aliments reappear in the article. Ralph “It must be chronic Lyme” Stricker gets a mention. As does Robert Bransfield, psychiatrist to the Lyme activists, and local lab tech Ahmed Kilani.
It’s hard to know where all this will end. I can’t see the CDC going back to Congress to say, “Hey, your constituents are nuts.” At the same time, they can’t just create a new disease or disease category to satisfy the personal opinions of one small group and their enablers.
Whatever it is -- and most doctors believe it's purely delusional -- Morgellons has become a grass-roots Web phenomenon. Google it, and nearly 162,000 references show up, many of them chock-full of vivid color photographs of what people claim are strange, colorful fibers growing under their skin. Several other sufferers have taken graphic videos of themselves poking with tweezers at what appear to be fiber-entangled lesions and then posted them on YouTube. Long online discussions ramble on about the latest conspiracy theories that cause the disease -- poisonous chemicals produced by the government and spread by jet contrails, so-called chem trails; aliens; artificially intelligent nanotechnology; genetic engineering; or a government bioweapon gone awry. Others debate the latest expensive cure-alls -- antibiotics, antifungal creams, vitamin supplements, liquid silver, food-grade diatomaceous earth, deworming medication meant for cattle.
But look on the official American Academy of Dermatology Web site, and Morgellons isn't there. The skin afflictions starting with M jump from "Molluscum contagiosum" to "Mucocutaneous candidiasis." Ditto on the Infectious Diseases Society of America. A search for Morgellons on the National Institutes of Health site returns "no pages found." There is only one study of Morgellons in a peer-reviewed medical journal, the holy grail for Western medicine.
Jeffrey Meffert, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Texas in San Antonio and a member of the American Academy of Dermatology, gives presentations to the medical community debunking Morgellons. It's not that people aren't suffering; they are, he says. It's just that he thinks they have something else, such as scabies or an eczema-like skin condition called prurigo nodularis that's little understood and for which there is no good treatment. And the fibers, he says, are easy to explain.
"People with very itchy skin have scabs, which ooze and tend to pick up threads from the environment, from dogs, cats, air filters, car upholstery, carpet," he says. "Any fibers that I have ever been presented with by one of my patients have always been textile fibers."
Posted by Relative Risk at 16:28 0 comments
Labels: Internet, Morgellons