OK, ick, that’s just so wrong.
It’s very interesting that anti-psychotic medication will kill whatever is infecting people with Morgellans.
Was there a diagnosis ? What were the pharmaceuticals used ?
A coloured anti-septic may help convince a difficult patient that the area is sterile.
Thanks for posting this study.
It however strikes me as a pile of crap.
For one thing, it is meaningless to cite presence of bacteria in four people who supposedly have “Morgellon’s”. You need a much larger study set, including controls. If there are similar “organisms” in the normal controls, that makes the observation meaningless. Note also that bacteria and fungi frequently colonize the superficial portion of your skin, and could get into deeper layers through scratching (see below) without being evidence of active infection (by “colonization”, I mean bugs existing on superficial skin and mucosa without causing symptoms, like the myriad bugs in your mouth and remainder of the G.I. tract).
And I’m far from convinced that those irregular squiggly things seen on silver staining are spirochetes. Silver staining is notorious for nonspecifically highlighting amorphous junk in tissue (I see it all the time in my work as a pathologist). The authors need to use far more rigorous techniques to establish that organisms are present.
And it comes as no surprise that they’d find filamentous stuff in their patients’ skin that immunostains for keratin, a normal component of skin. They theorize that patient skin produces such filaments in response to infection with spirochetes; it is far more likely that the filaments are produced due to excoriation (people who believe they have parasites, including “Morgellon’s” patients, frequently scratch and abrade their skin, producing damage that could be visible as filaments on microscopy.
In short, this is a poor excuse for research, and I’m also not surprised about the obscurity of the journal it is published in.
Psychological doesn’t necessarily mean ‘made up’. It’s quite possible for a person to suffer a psychological condition with similar symptoms as others, without having consciously known about them in advance - all it takes is for things to malfunction in a similar way.
Also - the article includes one photo purported to show electron micrographs of spirochetes - but that is unconvincing as well in the absence of any comparison photos to known specimens.
Claims of an infectious etiology have been debunked by prior studies.
*"After an exhaustive search, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found no sign of an infectious agent, parasite or environmental exposure that could explain the mysterious skin condition known as Morgellons disease.
People with the condition complain of crawling, itching and stinging sensations and they often see tiny fibers or filaments that poke out of sores on their skin.
But the long-awaited government study, released on Wednesday (1/25/12) in the journal PLoS One, found these fibers were mostly bits of cotton and nylon.
“We found no evidence that this condition is contagious, or that suggests the need for additional testing for an infectious disease as a potential cause,” said Dr. Mark Eberhard, director of CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One."*
Four subjects, no controls, authors with no academic affiliation (but members of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, an organization with just a wee bit of an agenda - check out their position statements where they take on and challenge such ignorant, biased institutions as the CDC, the New England Journal, etc.).
And, the journal itself? Look here, at the “authors’ fees”. By my reckoning, the journal has been paid some $23 million to this point by its contributing authors. Not a bad business. ETA: especially for an electronic publication with minimal production costs.
I am not convinced. Not even close.
Not to pile on (well OK, maybe a little):
The cited study mentions that the study subjects met “key clinical criteria” for Morgellon’s, but does not inform us what these criteria are (it would be difficult in any case, since there are no “key criteria” for an unrecognized disease).
Also, we are not told where the skin samples came from. This could be important, seeing that spirochetes are well-known to be human commensal organisms (i.e. found normally without causing symptoms in various parts of the body including the G.I. tract and genital skin). So one could photograph actual spirochetes in human tissue without it signifying the presence of disease.
I also had no idea that I had “similar symptoms as others”, I had had an incision in my left temple for a biopsy (negative) about five years earlier, and my first thought was that the crawly feeling was associated with that, which is why I googled the symptoms in the first place.
To the best of my recollection, I had never before heard of Morgellons, nor had I ever heard of any person describing such symptoms. I never said to myself “Oh, there’s that crawly feeling people get in their temple”. It was to me an experience not previously contemplated, which I googled to see if I was presenting with any known pattern of symptoms.
While it is true that a person can psychologically create symptoms that others have, that hypotheses carries the prerequisite that the patient knows that others have it, and I did not meet that test..
Is she on diet pills or any other form of stimulants that you know of?
Eh, old joke.
*“You gettin’ any on the side?”
“Been so long since I got any, I didn’t even know they’d moved it!”*
There’s a big difference between no evidence and evidence of nothing.
Do we understand viruses well enough to know that a virus couldn’t be causing the symptoms?
In any case, I do respect CDC when they say there’s no evidence of communicability, and that tends to corroborate the “no infectious cause” argument.
Still, I think it’s possible that there are things we don’t understand!
Nope, there’s no prerequisite. People can have psychosomatic illnesses. Those illnesses can have symptoms that the sufferer had no inkling of before seeing them: they’re not imagined. People can have similar enough symptoms to appear to have the same disease but not have the same disease (and this is true of both psychosomatic and normal physical illnesses). They can meet this criteria without any awareness of each others’ symptoms.
Psychosomatic illnesses aren’t “all in your head” and aren’t imaginary. They’re physical symptoms with predominantly mental causes. The word means “mind-body” and it’s good to keep that in mind. They’re different from psychological illnesses in that they have physical symptoms (though those symptoms can sometimes have no objective presentation. For example, one can feel pain without there being any objective evidence of a physical cause for the pain.
Ah, the old “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” rigmarole.
What it boils down to is proponents of “Morgellon’s Disease” ain’t got nuthin’.
No virus is known to cause such an odd constellation of symptoms, and none has been found (including in the CDC-sponsored study to exclude infectious causes).
*When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way, yeah, yeah *
- Stevie Wonder
It is widely understood in the medical community that many diseases may be caused by viruses, which have so far not been confirmed as a cause. Idiopathic congestive heart failure is one that comes to mind. No virus is “known” to cause it, but cardiologist suspect that there might be and are at a loss to explain it. As far as I know, no cardiologist is telling an idiopathic congestive heart failure patient that it is psychosomatic..
Just because “no virus has been found” as the cause of a condition, does not exclude the consideration and continued serious research into that possibility. If a large number of patients present ideopathically with an odd constellation of symptoms, one should not be so quick to rule out an actual disease caused by an as yet unidentified virus.
I read the subject as “Magellan syndrome” and thought I might have that. No open sores though, ick.
What if you had looked it up and found “delusional parasitosis” instead?
This is a poor comparison, because there’s a clear set of signs (i.e. objective findings) of idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, even if we are uncertain of the causative agent. Morgellon’s, such as it is, is a constellation of symptoms alone, with a persistent lack of any signs at all. Attempts to find objective signs (e.g. “filaments”) have failed.
No, all it requires is for the person to have a similar mechanism to create those symptoms.
Same as getting your first common cold did not require you to know that the common cold existed, getting a B12 deficiency or a psychosomatic disease do not require you to know such exist.
By definition, if there were a virus known to cause it, it would no longer be idiopathic.
“Idiopathic” cardiomyopathy is thought to have multiple causes, including a genetic susceptibility and infections (a number of viruses, including coxsackie viruses can cause it, along with bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections). Many other possible etiologies exist. There are some cases where workup does not establish a cause, but it’s hardly a mystery disease.
It also has well-defined clinical features and diagnostic criteria, so (as noted previously) the comparison to “Morgellon’s disease” is not a good one.