I wasn’t sure whether to place this in GQ or GD or even IMHO. But, either way, I’m looking to solicit the opinions of people far more knowledgable than I am on this subject. There’s an alleged awfully strange disease, called Morgellons, going around in South Texas, wherein the victims claim to be sweating black tar and to have thread-like fibers growing out of their skin. For reading:
My gut feeling is that the disease is a fake for the most part; people get scrapes or sores and fibers from clothing get stuck to those cuts and create the appearance of “growing outward”. Of course, dirty wounds in turn take longer to heal. Plus, pictures of active lesions (as opposed to isolated fibers) and black tar sweat are quite rare. :dubious: However, there are such strong feelings on this, I won’t close my mind to this.
My GD question is: Nearly all of the pictures on the website are those of extreme close-ups of the fibers. Are the photographs consistent with those of textile fibers?
Second, the website claims here http://www.morgellons.org/symptoms.html , if I am reading it correctly, that the fibers aren’t textile in origin because they glow under a blacklight. Doesn’t laundry detergent do the exact same thing?
Third, assuming that the empirical information presented on the website is true (e.g., the photographs haven’t been Photoshopped) is there anything that would point to Morgellons being a real disease, or delusional parasitosis? This last question is obviously quite subjective and might be IMHO or GD matter.
I am not able to answer the interesting questions you pose (indeed, I was not even aware of the entity).
I am struck, though, by the results one gets on searching “PubMed” for Morgellons Disease - exactly one cite. Never in thirty years have I come across a condition or disease with only one PubMed citation. Interesting!
Interesting. That PubMed abstract claims it’s been around 300 years, and the “fibers” pictures from that Ever Hopeful’s website resemble those on the website. Very mysterious. One of the main arguments in favor of this disease being real is that over one-thirds of the people registered on the Mollegons website are nurses, and the next biggest demographic are teachers.
Actually, and meaning no disrepect to nurses, the existence of a large number of nurses with a “disease” is also consistent with it being factitious. The best examples of this are the disproportionate number of nurses (and other health care workers) with self-induced hypoglycemia* and self-induced anemia*.
*there are other, better references, but I can’t access them through the web.
Actually, (apparently in review Karl Gauss has already addressed this) I always thought that nurses and other health care workers were among the most likely candidates for (incorrectly) self diagnosed diseases. If anything the preponderance of nurses and teachers in the affected cohort increases the likelihood it’s more a psychological than a physical issue.
Then how might one explain these fibers emerging from inflamed skin sites? No one has been able to connect the fibers to clothing or other likely sources, I believe.
Amazing. I would never have guessed this to be true of professions. In the school I went to, nurses had to take tons of science & chemistry classes and labs. One would think they’d have a better sense of rigor, and plenty of cynicism built up from seeing patients making a big deal of minor ailments.
It disturbs me that this has showed up in the popular press as an “infectious disease”. My guess is that this is a delusional paranoia that is fed by reports like those cited in the OP. Healthy, non-Morgellons people have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as the self-reported cases. I have a feeling that if the studies were appropriately controlled they would find nothing of interest in the Morgellon’s cases.
Yep, I agree. Thanks. I was hoping for a more detailed debunking of the photographs & claims on the website, but, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with “they’re crazy”.
