Morgellons Disease - New, Strange, and Scary - Health and Disease

We have recently not heard much about this somewhat obscure malady. It began to crop up in patients, young and old, in South Texas, beginning around 2002.

The federal agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describes Morgellons disease as one in which those who suffer from it have all sorts of "coetaneous" (I believe the government meant "cutaneous." [that is, skin]. "Coetaneous" means something of the same age or period.) symptoms, such as feelings of insects crawling, biting and stinging them on and under the skin. Additionally, they exhibit strange "threads," granules and black speck-looking things on or under the skin. They may also show skin lesions that appear as sores and rashes. There may also be body-wide symptoms of fatigue, memory loss and mental confusion, joint pain such as one encounters with arthritis, and there even may be vision problems.

Many physicians do not subscribe to that description, preferring, instead, to think of Morgellons Disease as a state of "delusional parasitosis." That is a mental condition in which the patient believes that he or she is beset with parasites. In short, most medical doctors don’t think that Morgellons is a physical malady but rather that it is a mental condition.

On the other hand, some physicians believe that Morgellons is for real. Some doctors state that they have observed Morgellons fibers under the microscope and by various other means. They have determined that the hundreds of fibers they studied looked very similar to one another, that they look nothing like textile fibers, and that, in any case, the fibers could not have been simply rubbed off of clothing because they were removed for their study from within the bodies of patients.

Those doctors, while they certainly declare that the fibers are present and frightening to patients, claim that the fibers are not nearly as important as is the nerve damage and other neurological injuries that accompany Morgellons Disease and affect a patient’s ability to think and to move their body in a normal way. There are difficulties of concentration, problems with communication similar to the multitude of untoward problems encountered in senility or the like.

So, what do doctors and ordinary folks do when, after pulling a fiber from under the skin or from a lesion and that fiber begins to twist and turn like some sort of worm looking for a home again? What sort of delusion is that?

You can find out lots more about Morgellons Disease by going to

www.morgellons.org/faq-home.htm, and also to http://www.cdc.gov/az/m.html after which you should scroll down to "Morgellons."

Although many medical doctors consider Morgellons to be a delusion, you will learn that others, many of them top professionals, do not think that way at all. They and the patients suffering from Morgellons are quite serious about the disease.

Perhaps you and I should be serious about Morgellons, too.

Oh yes, just one more very small thing you should know about Morgellons. There is no apostrophe before the "s." That’s a heads-up that I can provide to you while I am still Morgellons-free and able to write things with some remaining degree of rationality.