CDC Latest

Here’s an interesting article. Interesting in two parts, firstly because it contains more detail on what the CDC is doing, and secondly because it’s got such a ridiculous headline.

Skin-sore sufferers cast off as delusional

The headline is “Skin-sore sufferers cast off as delusional, and the article also says: “Most have bounced from doctor to doctor and been dismissed as delusional“, and “ Doctors tried to blame her case on stress and depression from the death of her husband in a car accident five years ago.”

Here’s the problem. Obviously people are sick, and they have physical problems. They are not imagining their sores. Yet the article says they have been “cast off” and “dismissed” as “delusional”. This gives the impression that the doctors think the patients are imagining their sores and other symptoms.

Symptoms are not delusions. Symptoms are symptoms. The delusion is in attributing the cause of their symptoms to a new disease which is making fibers come out of their skin. The delusion is thinking that there is stuff under your skin that you have to dig out with your fingernails.

The cases presented in the article are very sad. One woman digs out “grains of sand” and “curly white fibers” with her fingernails. She refuses to take the medication her doctors prescribe. The other woman pulls out “threads, black specks and crystals” from her skin, with tweezers, causing her pain. She also “follows doctors’ advice to bathe in bleach and vinegar baths.”

Are their sores entirely self inflicted? Or are they compounding a skin condition like pseudomonas folliculitis? Either way, they are not helping with their scratching and tweezing. I’d like to know what kind of “doctor” told her to bathe in bleach.

Clearly a lot of people who think they have Morgellons are delusional (or, as Randy Wymore says: “a bit eccentric”). This does not mean that their entire condition is delusional, it just means that delusion is a component of their condition.

The article clears up one thing: it was a 900 fiber database, and a 100,000 organic compound database used by the Tulsa PD, not a 100,000 fiber FBI database, as some reports suggested.

Read the article for the information on what the CDC is doing. I’m looking forward to the CDC’s initial report. It should clarify things immensely.