Imagine this: one night, you awaken from sleep feeling itchy all over. You scratch and scratch, eventually getting back to sleep. The next day, you feel like your skin is crawling. Your hair just doesn’t feel like your hair. A few days later, you see skin lesions on different parts of your body. You go to a dermatologist who looks at the lesions and prescribes a cortisone cream or thinks it might be scabies and prescribes an anti-scabies lotion. These don’t help.
Later, when you examine one especially itchy lesion with a magnifying glass, you see some sort of stuff coming out of your skin: red threads, yellow threads, black specks. You see and feel a sandy sensation in your bed.
Now you get worried.
You pull of a few threads and put them in a matchbox or a cellophane envelope and return to your dermatologist. He scrapes or biopsies a couple of areas and says “nothing, just normal skin” or “clothing fibers” and suggests a tranquilizer for your anxiety.
You go online and type “parasites under skin” and a bunch of repulsive skin conditions appear, but you were already checked for these. Then you retype your request as “threads coming out of skin” and start reading about Morgellons disease. When you finally reach the Wikipedia article, you know you’re in trouble.
Whoever wrote the wiki article (and based on the writing style, I suspect it was the people over at quackwatch.com) is pretty dim in the compassion and concern department. Basically it’s “Morgellons, eh? It’s all in your head!”
The Morgellons-Lyme-Bartonella link
