Mystery Of Morgellons Disease Or Delusion: Scientific Hypothesis Of Connection With Lyme Disease

One day you feel a strange stinging, biting or crawling sensation beneath your skin, which just won't go away. Then fibres begin to protrude from the skin or you may see red or blue lines below the surface of your skin. Eventually sores erupt all over your body, including in places you can't reach such as the middle of your back. You go to the doctor - and - after doing tests to rule out many other similar conditions, he finds that you fit the symptoms of a very rare condition, popularly called "Morgellons". He or she then tells you that this is not a real disease, but rather is a delusional condition. There is nothing physical causing this. It's just something going on in your mind which leads to all these symptoms. And then he or she offers to treat you with therapy and drugs to help you with your anxiety and neurosis. So, what do you do? Well - perhaps not surprisingly, many patients don't accept this diagnosis, and search on the internet, stop seeing their doctor about it, and try to find some other solution. There they find lots of ideas about what causes it, including nanotechnology, extra terrestrial life, and many other strange ideas. But amongst these, many of them will learn about a group of researchers who suggest that it is connected with Lyme disease, and can be treated by long term use of antibiotics. So you go back to your doctor and ask for treatment using antibiotics. But - at this point - he or she has to refuse you. Doctors are of course reluctant to prescribe antibiotics anyway unless it is needed because of antibiotic resistance. But this is for another reason. The suggested treatment here is to continue with antibiotics for years on end, not just for a few weeks. That can have serious effects on your overall health - in particular it can damage your liver. You would need to be monitored regularly to make sure your liver is okay. Which a doctor could do. But in this case, then the medical consensus for Morgellons is that it can't be treated with antibiotics. So if a doctor prescribes antibiotics for it, he or she is likely to be censured by the medical establishment for carrying out a potentially dangerous treatment that has no medical backing. And if anything went wrong he or she would be in serious trouble. So then, at this point some patients will go and buy antibiotics intended for animals, and treat themselves, which is clearly a dangerous thing to do. So what is the background to this? How have things come to this pass where some people are treating themselves in this way? And what can be done about it? And is there any truth in the idea that it can be treated with antibiotics?