Opinion

Last Monday I wandered into the Chinese doctor’s in Oxford, who also specialise in acupuncture. I had been meaning to go for a while, after I had read that others had had success with Chinese medicine as part of their Lyme disease treatment, and I was still looking for that elusive cure. The fact is that Western medicine is of limited use for Lyme, but there are a variety of medicinal plants that help many people. I started babbling about Lyme disease to the Chinese doctor, telling him all about my problems such as infection, carditis, insomnia, tingling, immunity, borrelia, chlamydia, ehrlichiosis. He took my details, and proceeded to examine me by feeling my pulse on both wrists.  After a short while, his diagnosis was “damp”, and suggested acupuncture. I said I wasn’t sure, but did he have some medicines instead? I was given Taohong Si Wu Wan and Shenling Bai Zhu Wan, for a cost of £22. I was happy to take them - Lyme disease is an expensive process of trial and error.

The recent article by Shapiro, Baker and Wormser in the American Journal of Medicine [1] exemplifies the struggles facing Lyme disease patients. It seems that for now, traditional thinking about Lyme disease still has the ear of the mainstream medical journals. The authors repeat the traditional view of Lyme disease, which is that Lyme disease is easy to diagnose and easy to treat. The authors assert that any challenge to this view is "fake news." The problem is that the same names keep cropping up in defence of this traditional view of Lyme disease, but there is much dissent among the research community, practitioners and patients about what Lyme disease actually is. Superficially, Lyme disease is bacterial infection, Borrelia burgdorferi, which affects various parts of the body. In theory once the bacteria have been treated with antibiotics, the patient should get better. Unfortunately, theory and practice diverge. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are now

In spite of all the dire warnings and practical consequences, the UK prime minister Theresa May is determined to push through with Brexit. Although there are a lot of warnings that things could go badly wrong, I get the sense that she thinks the UK will muddle through and it’ll all work out in the end. No matter how adverse the situation, one can always pull through. This got me thinking about where this blasé attitude comes from. The problem is that the Prime Minister has lead a privileged life, with a good dolloping of luck, where indeed everything has worked out for the best. It goes deeper than this though.  Conservatives themselves tend to be hard-working and better off. Nothing wrong with that, but the feeling seems to be that if only the poor would apply themselves more, they too could be rich. Consequently, the poor who choose to not apply themselves are therefore poor by choice, and conversely, the rich have only got there due to merit and work. Conservatives bel