The article by Lisa Chamoff, “AG chides Lyme panel for not following settlment agreement”, is a good read generally. We always appreciate balanced coverage. To read the full article, click here.
You can follow additional comments on Lyme policy at www.lymepolicywonk.org. You can contact Lorraine Johnson, JD, MBA at lbjohnson@lymedisease.org.
Every now and then you gotta kick up your heels. This year I headed back east for Time for Lyme's GALA. The Young People's Chorus of New York City gave an amazing performance of internationally inspired songs. Actor, Director and Writer Lou Diamond Phillips of Lyme Life gave a compelling speech and a rousing performance singing with the band–including the song LA BAMBA–which had everyone up dancing. The picture is me leaning in to talk with Dr. Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of HIV, who was honored at the GALA.
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Biased reporting harms the credibility of journalism, harms patients, and misleads the public. The recent Tribune piece, which is now being republished in other Tribune outlets (including the Los Angeles Times) distorts and manipulates reality and makes a ‘good story’ at the expense of professional journalism. It does this by ignoring science, and by characterizing patients as hapless victims and their physicians as frauds. It was called to task for its profound lack of professionalism by Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Articles on science that do not present both sides of a legitimate controversy in science do a serious injustice and may violate the canons of journalist ethics established by the Society of Professional Journalism. Today, I look at some of those canons and point out how the Tribune article fell short. More after the jump. . .
Well, as you can see, I’ve reached the cutting and pasting portion of writing my speech for the IDSA Lyme Guidelines Review Panel—a bit like making a quilt. You start off with yards of different fabrics, cut them into little squares and eventually reassemble them into the quilt, tying off the edges carefully and trying not to prick yourself with the needle on the way. As a patient advocate, I am allotted 15 minutes to make my point and leave the podium. By the way, it is a lot more difficult to write a 15 minute speech than a 45 minutes speech—size matters. It’s like Mark Twain said: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Dr. Stricker and I have published a new peer-reviewed article on the flawed IDSA Lyme guidelines development process, the antitrust investigation, and the lack of impartiality in the mandated review process run by the IDSA. The article is now the number 1 accessed article of the publisher with over 1600 hits in the week since it was published. (Johnson L, Stricker R. “The Infectious Diseases Society of America Lyme guidelines: A cautionary tale about development of clinical practice guidelines,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine;5:9 2010.) The article is open access. The two lead in quotes set the stage. The first is by one of the nation’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson: ‘Without health, there is no happiness’. The second quote is by Thucydides and speaks to power and its abuse. ‘The strong do what they can; the weak endure what they must’. An excerpt of the article follows the jump:
