Written by John Lounsbury
Treatment of Lyme Disease has been controversial for the past 30+ years. A group of doctors who treat the disease as a primary practice are at odds with the larger medical community and the CDC (Center for Disease Control). The major source of disagreement is whether Lyme Disease is a simple bacterial infection that can be successfully treated by a short course of an appropriate oral antibiotic or can it be a more persistent disease in some cases requiring extended periods of treatment.
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A 2020 book, Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine, addresses this controversy. The book is part of a series: Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography (14 books). The author of “Divided Bodies” is Abigail A. Dumes, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan, AnnArbor.
From the University of Michigan website:
Abigail Dumes is a medical and cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in the United States, France, and Cameroon. Dumes received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Yale University, and her first book, Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine, was published by Duke University Press in September 2020. Her ongoing research explores the relationship among gender, contested illness, infectious disease, and environmental risk in the United States and engages with scholarship in medical anthropology, feminist science studies, and environmental studies.
From the New Books Network:
Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy that sheds light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States. Drawing on fieldwork among Lyme patients, doctors, and scientists, Dumes formulates the notion of divided bodies: she argues that contested illnesses are disorders characterized by the division of bodies of thought in which the patient’s experience is often in conflict with how it is perceived. Dumes also shows how evidence-based medicine has paradoxically amplified differences in practice and opinion by providing a platform of legitimacy on which interested parties–patients, doctors, scientists, politicians–can make claims to medical truth.
Prof. Dumes has been interviewed by Claire D. Clark, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, who is a historian of medicine, specializing in behavioral studies, at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.
Disclosure: I have been treated for Lyme Disease numerous times since late 1988 after being first infected sometime in the mid-1980s and not treated for several years. I have been treated since then after personally observed tick bites, after indicative circular rashes for which no tick bite was observed, and occasionally for symptoms. I have tested positive for Lyme Disease and not positive at various times over the past 33 years. My initial treatment in 1988 was made based on skeletal pain and swelling deformities and in the absence of a positive Lyme titer in a blood sample. After 2 months of oral antibiotics my symptoms were significantly relieved and completely resolved after 3 months.
After several successful one-month treatments for new reinfection from observed tick bites or rashes, I suffered a severe muscular event in 1996 with excruciating pain in the quadriceps muscles of my left leg. This was the first time that I produced a positive Lyme titer. By the time I finished a 3-month regimen of oral antibiotics that eliminated the pain, the quadriceps muscles were at least 70% atrophied. This after less than 4 months from the onset of the event. It took almost a year of physical therapy to return the afflicted left quadriceps to a condition close to the unafflicted right quadriceps.
In 2010, five years after moving from my previous tick infested location to a state with little Lyme Disease, my 1996 experience was almost exactly repeated in the right quadriceps. This time I recognized what was happening right away and started treatment which again lasted for 3 months. The atrophy was a little less this time (~50%) and physical therapy took only about 8-9 months.
In 2017 I moved again, this time into an area with a greater deer tick population. I have had one tick bite since moving (about 2 years ago) and had a one-month course of oral antibiotics which was apparently successful.
With this personal history you can understand why I was immediately drawn to this new book, which I intend to read in the near future.
Caption graphic photo credit: Image by kalhh from Pixabay.
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