Wouldn’t you run the risk of attracting nutbag conspiracy types to your shows?
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That’s the idea. You get on stage, tell them that your song “Grifter” is an all natural cure when played loudly overnight, and sell out your entire inventory of CDs at every show.
Stupid people’s money spends just as sweetly as anyone else’s.
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Also lovely to see that my PubPeer browser extension continues to function just fine. Always great to have a nice red bar pop-up to tell me when there’s some good counter-commentary to ground a misleading paper 
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Don’t science without it 
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The unstated major premise in your question is that he actually had Lyme disease. There’s a subtlety here that mainstream reporting tends to miss because they don’t understand the alt-med cult. They harbour a belief in something they call “Chronic Lyme” wherein they believe they are continuously being reinfected as a way to explain their fatigue, depression, or other vague symptoms of being alive. To be very clear about this, “Chronic Lyme” does not exist. It is not a real thing.
This then gets reported in the media as “Lyme Disease” which is of course a real thing that some people have and is straightforward to treat.
Many people in the grips of alt-med belief think they have “Chronic Lyme” and take all sorts of nonsense for it, so the most likely explanation is this is what Lemoi was doing.
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You were the dumb one.
Ivermectin killed the ivermectin star.
Ivermectin killed the ivermectin star.
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i hold to the idea that chronic lyme might be … something. we know people are experiencing long covid, and that’s a thing ( or a set of things more likely ) lacking clear identifiers and mechanics
we shouldn’t expect that - at this point in history - doctors are able to correctly diagnosis everything healthwise that humans experience.
in fact id say the dismissiveness that some professionals have about people’s symptoms - especially poc and women - are exactly what nudge some people into the woo
i, as a white guy, haven’t experienced this. but my aunt had chronic anemia that took years for anyone to acknowledge, and a good friend had to harangue their doctor over multiple visits into believing their symptoms were real and after demanding scans discovered they had late stage cancer
some people are cranks, some people are not. i think it’s hard sometimes to know the difference ( not obviously re: ivermectin. that’s clear )
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My wife is an Infectious Disease Physician and chronic lyme is the worst.
First it isn’t a thing that exists but there is a whole industry around convincing people they have it, normal medicine can’t help them, and only expensive treatments over a long time actually work.
It’s very difficult to convince people they dont have chronic lyme when they have been lied to and so much disinformation is out there.
The other problem is many of these people have something. And that is causing symptoms and may very well be treatable. Its a lot of work to build the trust to get a patient onto the right path to identify and treat the real underlying condition in the face of well funded bad information.
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While post-infectious syndromes are a vastly overlooked aspect of disease pathophysiology, “chronic lyme” is a different animal. There are unquestionably folks who suffer terribly from the long-term neurological consequences of tertiary Lyme disease. The problem comes when unscrupulous folks con them by telling them that they have unrelenting, ongoing infection and need to be on long term antibiotics and other highly dubious “cures.” It is truly shameful that we have only begun to acknowledge the reality of post-infectious syndromes, one of the few good things that may arise from the pandemic. I have hopes that by discovering the mechanism by which our immune system can cause these problems (I am one who thinks that is the most likely to be productive paths for this research to go, but there are other)
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There’s also the sheer prevalence of things like ME/CFS and the inability/unwillingness of doctors to be even rudimentarily educated in its identification and treatment. It gets viewed as psychosomatic and recommended to therapies directly contraindicated by evidence (due to an influential UK partisan doctor). It’s too complicated for most physicians to care for, affects otherwise healthy people in their early 30’s, requires collaboration between multiple specialists, and doesn’t reduce their life expectancy.
Hard to find adequate care by a qualified doctor, but there’s an army of alternative medicine folks who’ll gladly sign you up for their proprietary multivitamin.
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yeah, both of these things are completely fair.
i could have said better that people who think they have chronic lyme might well have something even if it’s not chronic lyme, because i agree that people are being taken advantage of
i was mostly pushing back against the idea that @VeronicaConnor said about it being “vague symptoms of being alive.”
it’s a complicated line, both believing people in their self reporting and convincing them that no radio waves aren’t going to disrupt their chi, and no zinc isn’t going to stop covid, or whatever
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There isn’t a whole lot of money in curing disease, much less preventing it. The big bucks are in chronic diseases that people suffer from for decades.
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The caveat to this is if it is caught early. The longer someone goes with undiagnosed Lyme disease, the more likely and severe the chronic symptoms.
Again, not to be confused with “chronic Lyme.”
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Oh absolutely. It’s in fact a known thing that this happens. I don’t mean to sound dismissive of anyone with chronic conditions that they aren’t getting help with or that doctors can’t identify. Those things absolutely exist. However you have to look for the red flags too. With someone like Lemoi who has a long history of alt medicine, conspiracy theories, and other woo, it’s reasonable to be very skeptical of claims of chronic conditions.
The current science-based medicine consensus on it is that it’s a combination of various undiagnosed things combined with a percentage of people are just tired and don’t get enough exercise of whatever. There’s no consistent set of symptoms unique to “chronic Lyme”, and thus no reason to believe it’s one thing. Doctors call this “symptoms of life”. We’re all stressed and tired a lot for no reason (or for good reasons too). More so if you’re depressed. A lot of folks try to assign this to a disease because it’s easier than dealing with more complex issues like mental illness or poor lifestyle choices. That doesn’t mean none of them don’t actually have something, but there’s no evidence to suggest “chronic Lyme” is any one thing.
This is why alt med persists. A lot of people with no scruples make a lot of money on it. Just like every accusation Republicans make is a projection, same for alt med people who accuse “western” (ie. science-based) medicine of profiteering. It’s the alt-med people getting rich on this stuff, not the overworked physicians. This is separate from American pharmaceutical companies of course, who absolutely do engage in profiteering and other horrible things. We’d have a lot easier time separating people from woo if we could separate the idea of science-based medicine from drug companies. The latter are pretty evil, but nothing to do with the former.
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