Rate this book

Cure Unknown: Inside The Lyme Epidemic (2008)

by Pamela Weintraub(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0312378122 (ISBN13: 9780312378127)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

St. Martin's Press

review 1: I'm a pediatrician and I came to this book as a skeptic. There is so much anti-science and pseudo-science around and I thought that blaming all manner of ills on this infectious disease was probably another example. After all, weren't the CDC and IDSA the highest authorities on the issue?I read the book partly because I'm interested in the question of how people in general decide what to believe about controversial issues, especially in health. Why do people believe the CDC, their friend, their doctor, a book, or an Internet post, when the authorities present conflicting information? Clearly, the experts know more about Lyme disease, say, than the average person. When the experts disagree, what basis does the lay person have for choosing between them? How can you judge the... more evidence and logic of the experts without understanding even more than they do?This book is an excellent example of a skilled person actually trying to understand more than the experts, if not in depth then in breadth. The author works not only from many individual stories (common in pseudo-science) but also with much scientific and technical information. Judging from the hundreds of references at the end of the book, much of this evidence is drawn from mainstream, peer-reviewed journals.Weintraub argues persuasively that the establishment views of Lyme disease, the ideas and guidelines formulated by the CDC and IDSA, have been distorted by several factors. These include academic politics, financial interests, turf wars, the complexity of the disease, and hardening of attitudes caused by the "Lyme war" itself (the author notes early in the book the unusual degree of personalization in this conflict, with leaders from all sides being demonized as mentally ill or evil).Having read the book, I am still a skeptic but now a bit skeptical of the objectivity and authority of the establishment. It's hard for me to imagine that there are masses of people with debilitating symptoms of chronic Lyme disease, denied valid treatment because of the intransigence of the medical establishment (and insurance companies). However, unless Weintraub is lying--and I'm sure she is not--the evidence is too strong dismiss out of hand.My only caveat is that the book is one-sided. Though it deals with some of the mainstream arguments (such as the claim that a short course of antibiotics will kill almost all the Lyme organisms), it does not give any space to an establishment refutation of the "Lyme movement" views. Before making up my mind on the issue, I would certainly want to read a good response from the IDSA, answering point-by-point the issues brought up in the book. I doubt such a response would clear the air, but it would be just as unreasonable to ignore their response as to ignore this book itself.
review 2: This book must be the definitive book on Lyme Disease. Since our daughter was diagnosed over a year ago, it's been a steep learning curve. Weintraub, her husband and two sons were all infected. Despite her personal experiences, I felt Weintraub, as a professional science writer and an editor of Discover Magazine, went to some effort to be balanced in her reporting of what is a very politically controversial disease. In fact there is SO much information it's hard to get a handle on it. That's as much a function of the complexity of Borrelia as it is her writing, although I could have used some real basic explanations of Serology 101 and antibody testing. By the time I got to the end I sort of understood but I'd rather have understood sooner.This book could be read by anyone interested in science and medicine and what gets in the way of good science. Rarely in recent memory have patients and medical establishment been as adversarial as they are in the Lyme debate. On one side are patients whose Lyme returns and returns and who seem to be helped by long courses of antibiotics and on the other by doctors who say that chronic Lyme doesn't exist, that it's an immune system response. Yet how to explain the thousands who say antibiotics have helped? The patient taking long term anti-biotics, sometimes intravenously, becomes a nice culture medium for a "super-bug" which physicians are justifiably alarmed about. Yet these folks are really suffering, in many cases fatally, and anti-biotics help!.Only after reading Weintraub's book did I really understand the immune system issues and could understand why scientists are attracted to that explanation. It made me wonder if there is some other property of antbiotics (other than an ability to kill microbes) that ameliorates an immune response. less

Download links for: Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic

Advertising