Chronic Lyme is not a genuine diagnosis. People who think they suffer from chronic Lyme (but don’t) are really suffering, however, and since most medical organizations have standards and observe things like accuracy and accountability, they are often unable to come up with clear answers or help to these people. So we have a discrepancy here, ready to be filled by conmen and opportunists. Lyme-literate Doctors is a group of scammers, conspiracy theorists and confused medical providers (it is usually hard to determine to which subgroup particular members belong) who have decided, for various reasons, to grab the opportunity and dazzle people in vulnerable positions with the trappings of recognition and care, pseudoscience and expensive bullshit. They are organized in the group the International Lyme and Associated Disease (ILADS), which provide rather aggressive support, including legal support, for whatever quackery any one of their affiliated doctors might decide to engage in. And the organization has become rather powerful.
Steven Jeffrey Harris, a California-based physician and the son of ILADS cofounder and IgeneX founder Nick Harris, is a bit of a celebrity in chronic Lyme circles and a central member of ILADS and Lymedisease.org (formerly CALDA) as well as a “clinical consultant” for IgeneX, all organizations famous for spreading misinformation about Lyme disease. Though he is board certified in Family Medicine, Harris has no recognized advanced credentials in infectious diseases, and it is notable that he practices in California, where real Lyme disease is rather uncommon – people who think they suffer from chronic Lyme are not that rare, however, and Harris has received some attention for his work with celebrities, like Kris Kristoffersen, whom Harris treated with a.o. antibiotic intramuscular injections, which has of course no effect on a condition that doesn’t exist but may decimate the patient’s natural bacterial flora and breed resistant bacteria (as well as giving the impression that the patient is taken seriously).
Harris’s dubious practices haven’t quite escaped attention. In 2013, the Medical Board of California charged him with Gross Negligence and/or Repeated Negligent Acts and/or Incompetence with respect to three patients, to whom Harris had recommended a variety of quackery, including bizarre drug cocktails, lab tests, and visits to doctors and alternative practitioners. The nonsense included dozens of medications and homeopathic remedies, and at least one of the patients suffered life threatening complications from the treatments, despite no plausible evidence that any of them were suffering from what Harris claimed they were suffering from. Even so, the reprimand, probably due to California’s Lyme quack protection law, only applied to the intravenous garlic Harris had prescribed to two of them – although at least the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation refused to renew his license to practice medicine. (The complaint also listed one Y.L., presumably Harris’s long-time employee Yvonne Lin Sorenson, and C.R., presumably naturopath Claire Riendeau, whose website has listed Harris as one of her advisers.)
Harris has apparently also suggested, utterly ridiculously, that there might be a link between Lyme disease and autism, and he has allegedly also supplied patients to Indian predatory stem cell clinic Nutech Mediworld.
Diagnosis: A genuine public menace. Avoid at all cost.
Hat-tip: Lymescience.org
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