Issues → July/August 2007 → Feature Stories →
Lyme Disease: One Woman's Journey
(page 7 of 8)
And as it spreads, physicians and researchers continue to squabble among themselves: Some say that long-term antibiotics are the only way to treat Lyme, while the more conventional among them advocate only short doses of antibiotics -- and believe that if a patient needs a longer protocol, the illness must not be Lyme. Insurance coverage is often denied.
One way to stop an epidemic is to redefine it. Recent guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) have narrowed the disease's diagnostic criteria so tightly that it's hard for any chronically ill Lyme patient to fit the profile -- leaving thousands of people robbed of an answer.
And one way to control an outbreak is to determine which doctors can treat it and which ones cannot. According to the Lyme Disease Association, since the early 1990s more than 30 Lyme specialist physicians in 10 states have been brought before state medical boards under charges of overdiagnosing Lyme and overtreating with antibiotics. This, of course, is a chilling development for doctors who want to treat Lyme patients.
Charles Ray Jones, M.D., is a 78-year-old pediatrician whose New Haven practice has embraced 10,000 children with Lyme since 1968. "I didn't know I was treating Lyme patients at the time. There was no such thing," Jones says. In fact, he's not only the world's foremost pediatric chronic Lyme disease specialist, he's virtually the only one.
I've come to see him on a rainy Sunday afternoon, the only day of the week he doesn't see patients. A humble man, Jones lives in an apartment in an unremarkable high-rise. His commute to his office is a flight of stairs.
His patients come from all over the country to his office, just down the street from Yale's School of Medicine. In addition to seeing patients all day long, for the past year he's been driving north on a regular basis to a Hartford hearing room, trundling a wheeled suitcase filled with papers relating to the case against him, which may rob him of his license to practice.
He greets me in the courtly manner of his generation, almost bowing. In placid tones, he explains his life with Lyme. In the 1960s, he was a staff physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. During that time, he and his wife began to look to the Connecticut countryside as a better place to raise their children. In 1968, they moved to Hamden, then a sleepy hamlet beside the Quinnipiac River, and he set up his practice.
"I started seeing children in clusters with what we thought was juvenile rheumatoid arthritis," he says. "This was very rare. But it wasn't really JRA. It didn't fit the whole picture. The clusters were not just in Lyme; they were all around. And there were many of them. Polly [Murray] was instrumental because she demanded they do something about this."
Along with Allen Steere and Eugene Shapiro, M.D., who now sits on the opposite side of the hearing room, Jones worked to solve the puzzle of this peculiar, crippling ailment. "Sure, we were colleagues at first," he notes. "We were all trying to figure it out. You could say we were mired in a lack of understanding." For Jones, this search for knowledge transformed into his specialty. He became an LLMD, Lyme literate by evolution.
"At what point did all this become contentious?" I ask.
"I was never part of that," he says. "I heard things, but I was busy. I just figured that was their problem."
Now it's his problem, too. Jones has been charged with diagnosing two children in Nevada with Lyme disease before examining them, and with prescribing antibiotics for them over the phone. Shapiro, his former colleague, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at Yale's medical school, not only brought the charges against Jones but also helped write the guidelines that have narrowed the disease's diagnostic and treatment guidelines. The Hartford Courant once quoted Shapiro as saying that he had had calls from physicians in Connecticut "begging me to see their patients so they don't have to see Dr. Jones."
Reader Comments
Comment from Donna Zuk on June 6, 2008
I have Yankee magazine emailed to me every month, but in June last year I moved back to Connecticut after spending 2 years in North Carolina near my grandchildren and missed this article until now. I have been having weird ripping pains in my hands that heal in about 4 days only to return. I could hardly hold a pen today with sharp pains shooting in my hand whenever I tried to do normal activities. After a year of this, and it not getting better today after my usual 4 days or so of healing, I decided to go to the walk-in. I have lab work that I have to get done, and I noticed a Lymes disease test.
Funny thing I thought. Many years ago (16) a doctor tested me for hypothyroidism, Lymes, and Epstein Barr/mono. The Lymes and thyroid tests were negative. The Epstein Barr titer test was positive. I was diagnosed with Chronic Epstein Barr.
Years later after getting a tetanus shot, weird things began happening. Pain, severe pain, muscle spasms and muscle jerks spread all over my body, then 2 months later burning, boiling pain. Tender pain I used to call "it feels like raw hamburg pain." Then if I did some sit ups, I would have serious tender pain between my muscles and rib bones. I'd say, it feels like someone hit me with a baseball bat multiple times. My exhaustion for years continued. I would wish for death. I would cry from the pain and exhaustion. I didn't want to be in a relationship so they wouldn't have to deal with my limited life.
After seeing multiple doctors, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I always feel sick. I have a hard time getting up in the morning and a hard time falling asleep, or staying asleep. I always hurt.
I came home tonight with thoughts of the meaning of my painful hand symptoms and what they might have to do with Lymes disease? I began my internet search again. Again I was reminded of another search I had done, and the tell-tale sign of the bulls eye rash. It's a funny thing because I had that once... (27 years ago) more than one on the same leg, so I counted it out. It was more than one area so it can't be Lymes. The Lymes test was negative, and there was also more than one bulls eye area at the same time (and it didn't get better). Then I read on the net, you can have more than one even if there's only one bite.
Ok, so now I continue searching trying to find any type of bite that might have the look of my bulls eye. My bulls eye was not the red rash. I distinctly remembered mine were bruises. You can imagine after all these years of never mentioning it to a doctor. I am now a nurse, (and after 19 years of nursing at 50 years old going back to college because my repetitive 'injuries' and exhaustion is making life miserable if not impossible at times) I was not a nurse when I had these bulls eyes but niether was I taught about lymes disease in nursing... never mind atypical BRUISE-type bulls eyes! Thank you so much for this article, and please, please thank that nurse!
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