Personal Science and Lyme Disease

Here is a website devoted to a new way to cure Lyme disease: ingesting large amounts of Vitamin C and salt. The website is vague about who made it but it certainly isn’t a for-profit enterprise. It begins:

After 13 years of suffering with Lyme disease, a possible cure has been stumbled upon. A cumulative effect of much research has produced the possibility that salt and vitamin C may be all that is needed to beat this elusive illness. Without going into a lot of detail, our theory is that Lyme is not just a bacterial disease, but also an infestation of microfilarial worms. . . From experimenting with the treatment of salt and vitamin C, we settled on a dosage of 3 grams of salt and 3,000 mg of vitamin C, each dose taken 4 times per day. . . . The Treatment can be grueling; taking it with food may aid in digestion. The results [= the improvement] should be almost instantaneous.

Unsurprisingly, people a naive person might think would be interested turned out to be not be interested:

We have tried on three occasions to get help [= interest in our findings] through the CDC to no avail. The responses were things such as: thanks, we’ll forward to a lyme researcher; or, we don’t accept contributions or downloads from individuals; or, these pictures are obviously fakes. . . . We tried the university routine. A public health researcher put us onto a microbiology chair, who sent us to a CDC parasitologist, who said he wasn’t a clinician and suggested a pathologist. . . . We tried the most noted lyme sites on the web. We were disappointed that most of them seem more concerned with fundraising than disease.

Which sounds like “we” is one person a man. In any case, I hope “they” will allow outsiders to contribute experiences, perhaps by adding forums to the site. This is terrific work.