Desperate People Do Desperate things

So I’m a little worked up this morning. Last night I saw a post on Facebook on one of the Lyme pages I follow that started up my alarm bells. A patient with Lyme Disease posted pics of a page out of the book, The Master Mineral Solution of the 3^rd Millenium, by “Archbishop” Jim Humble, along with pictures of bottles of Sodium Chlorite (basically bleach) and Hydrochloric Acid, which is a very corrosive acid. So corrosive in fact, that when I worked with it back in my pharmaceutical chemist days, it had to be done under a hood. You didn’t want it on your skin, you didn’t want to breathe in the fumes, and you certainly didn’t want to digest it. But this person was actively promoting the health benefits of taking both of these liquids, in diluted form.

I read the section that came from the book that was posted in one of those pics, and I’ll share it here:

Borreliosis, Lyme Disease

 

Borreliosis and Lyme are the same disease. It is known in Europe as

Borreliosis and in the Americas as Lyme disease. In Europe, most

people still consider that it is caused by a tick and in America, it

is pretty well accepted that it comes from many different sources,

although it probably was carried by a tick originally. The well-known

story is that the disease was created in a government laboratory

near the City of Lyme, New Hampshire. There was an explosion in

the lab and the disease got spread to the local wild animals. The

ticks then spread it throughout the wild community in the U.S. and

people spread it to Europe. Anyway that is the story.

 

Since it’s been awhile since I studied proper MLA format to site my sources, I’ll add here that this was on page 96 in her copy of the book she posted, but the same entry can be found on an online version of Jim Humble’s book, on page 86, about 1/3 of the way down on the web page: http://archive.org/stream/TheMasterMineralSolutionOfThe3rdMillennium/The_Master_Mineral_of_the_Third_Millennium_djvu.txt

So does anyone want to guess why I’ve got my panties in a bunch?

Aside from the ever-so-popular governmental lab explosion conspiracy theory, the basic fact of Lyme being in Connecticut and not New Hampshire indicates that this book was not edited very well, if a basic fact like that was missed. And while on the topic of editing, what editor would actually let that last sentence stand? I haven’t seen a sentence like that since my daughter was in grade school.

But honestly the purpose of this post isn’t to rip Mr. Humble a new one. After all, I haven’t read the book. (To be quite honest, I have no interest in plunking down any money for a book that seems to have not undergone a proper edit.) It’s actually more of a commentary on the fact that there are so many Lyme disease patients, who are so horribly ill, so desperate to find relief from their symptoms, and dare I say it, an actual cure, that they are willing to try anything. The medical community really needs to step up to the plate, and start acknowledging the true depth of this and other tick borne illnesses. Insurance companies and governing bodies need to stop intimidating doctors who are trying to get their patients better with “atypical” courses of antibiotics like they are handing out heroine on the street.

Lyme patients need reputable drug companies doing real research. Until then, the chronically ill will continue to look for answers anywhere they can find them, and sometimes that results in patients being taken advantage of by charlatans selling snake oils at best, poison at worst.