Morgellons: Real or a state of mind?
While its sufferers describe wild symptoms of the disease, many doctors doubt it exists.
By Melissa Healy, Times Staff Writer
November 13, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Envision a nightmare of horror, conspiracy, medical mystery, human suffering and cyberspace, and you might get a phenomenon that has come to be called Morgellons disease.
In more than 5,000 households across the country and in a handful of doctor's offices, sufferers and the people who treat them subscribe to the idea that there is abroad in the land a new type of infection — a parasite, a worm, a virus — its source as yet unknown.
Theories as to its origin have included alien abductions, a French government conspiracy to poison bottled water, and exposure to a wide range of toxic pollutants.
To its victims, who call themselves "Morgies" and congregate almost exclusively in cyberspace, Morgellons is a disease that is dreadfully, painfully real. To doubters — among them, the vast majority of dermatologists to whom most patients turn first — Morgellons is almost certainly a painful, dreadful psychosis called delusional parasitosis, an age-old affliction that dermatologists have studied in medical texts and seen in their offices for as long as their specialty has existed. What is new, they say, is the name, the online community that has formed around it and the growing conviction among victims that it is a real, new disease.
Far-fetched though the disease may seem to the uninitiated, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating potential causes. Sufferers hope to find the true reason for their misery; doctors hope to finally put this Morgellons business to rest. Public health officials hope they can rule out the possibility that some new infection or unseen environmental toxin has unleashed a disease so awful it is driving sufferers to despair.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/ ... &cset=true
I did a story on this a number of months ago and it is not imaginary. It is real. Here is another link with pictures. Some are a little gross but, the entire articles are worth reading.
http://www.morgellons.org/ follow the link and then go to images.
