Allen Steere - Lyme Disease Controversy

Lyme Disease Controversy

By the mid-1990s, Steere had watched Lyme disease gain acceptance, but he worried that Lyme disease had become a "junk-drawer diagnosis", covering maladies ranging from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia to hypochondria. Steere was concerned that many people with no evidence of past or present Lyme disease receiving antibiotic treatments, especially treatments beyond the recommended four week treatment guideline protocol, "were being done more harm than good".

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1993, Steere and colleagues stated that Lyme disease had become "overdiagnosed" and overtreated. This statement became a rallying point for what advocacy groups call the Lyme disease controversy. In the face of some elements of mainstream medical opinion, some doctors and patient advocacy groups claim that Lyme disease can develop into a chronic disease requiring high doses of antibiotics over long periods of time. However aside from the issue of terminology, some mainstream medical opinion goes as far as to assert that some Lyme disease cases can become "difficult to treat" if not quickly diagnosed.

Although the term "chronic Lyme" was once used by Steere and others to define persistent complications following acute Lyme disease, various Lyme advocacy organizations and a dissident group of doctors called the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) have redefined the term to describe a wide range of symptoms, mostly in patients who have no evidence of Lyme disease. Steere and his colleagues averred that even patients with a positive serology for Borrelia infection and with symptoms resembling those of CFS or fibromyalgia, would not be helped by further antibiotics.

Steere's prominence, and his support of the medical view that patients with "chronic Lyme disease" often have no actual evidence of Lyme disease and are not helped by long courses of antibiotics, led to him being targeted, harassed, and threatened with death by patients and advocacy groups angered by his refusal to validate their belief that they suffer from chronic Lyme disease.