Science Forums 2

[Pyrotex]

We also make a mistake when we point to Lymes disease and say, "See, if a new disease comes around, doctors always accuse people of having mental problems."

It doesn't work that way. A really new disease may fool many doctors for a few years, but as soon as a few articles show up in medical journals, boom!, they all tip over in the opposite direction and get busy dealing with the new disease.

The problem is, medical doctors at the street level (your family doctor) is NOT trained to recognize new, undefined, unseen, never-before-described diseases! They ARE trained to recognize established, understood, seen-before, categorized diseases.

When a new disease crops up, the family doctors are stymied, as well may be the specialists in the big city medical centers. They report their mystery cases to something like the National Disease and Contagion Center (I made that up) who collect statistics. As soon as a pattern appears--dozens of people with a new set of unexplained symptoms (like morgellons), then eventually a research team looks into it. And voila! Lymes Disease gets its due recognition and treatments begin to appear.