The FEDS' Use Of Coercion To Destroy The Career Of Lyme Disease Specialist Dr. Joseph Burrascano

The following is a synopsis of my experiences with one Dr. Joseph Burrascano, a pioneering researcher and world renowned expert in the treatment of chronic Lyme Disease.

In 1993 Dr. B as his patients called him, read a scathing and truthful testimony before Senator Ted Kennedy and the US Senate Committee On Health, in which he accused certain physicians who were ineffective in treating Lyme Disease, of deliberately undermining physicians who were treating Lyme Disease more aggressively than the standard treatment protocol of the time called for, having greater success in bringing about remissions in a number of their patients .

This statement describes the nightmare that all chronic Lyme Disease patients face in obtaining treatment for this biological weapon. It discusses the attack on physicians who treat this illness as well as the conspiracy that the US Health Insurance Industry is guilty of in denying Lyme patients coverage for proper treatment. In 2007, with Lyme Disease having become a pandemic, this problem is now worse than ever.

** I should also state that I was a patient of Dr. Burrascano's for eight years, and want to note the following items of importance:

1. Some time in 1999 during an office visit, I had asked Dr. Burrascano if he thought that Lyme Disease might be a biological weapon. His answer to me at the time was that he would not rule it out. Shortly before asking him this I had read the book "The Brucellosis Triangle" by Dr. Donald Scott, which described Lyme Disease as a bio weapon, and documented irrefutable sources by way of the US Freedom Of Information Act, that this was indeed true. In the present day, Dr. Burrascano is a founding member of ILADS (The International Lyme Disease And Associated Diseases Society) and its First Vice President, whose position on Lyme Disease is that it is in fact a biological weapon!

2. The US Health Insurance Industry and the American Medical Association long ago conspired to destroy Dr. Burrascano and his medical practice by using the New York State Office Of Professional Medical Conduct to conduct a witch hunt against him, based on trumped on up charges.

They have also done so with many other Lyme literate physicians practicing within the State of New York.

After several years of unreasonable and inappropriate investigations concerning his practice, Dr. Burrascano was exonerated of nearly all of the charges (and most certainly the most important ones), after spending a considerable sum of money for his defense. Some other Lyme physicians in New York were not so fortunate and have lost their medical practices as well as their licenses to practice medicine.

However, mysteriously, after spending more than $100,000 to defend his practice and reputation, in 2006 ( just a few years after the OPMC's investigation against him ended with his exoneration) Burrascano announced that he would be closing his practice within months of actually doing so.

To anyone who knew Dr. Burrascano, this made absolutely no sense at all, given that he had spent a tremendous amount of money in mounting a legal defense to keep his practice open. The practice was worth a considerable amount of money generating what must have been several million dollars a year in revenue.

Given this why would he simply have closed his doors after nearly two decades of treating Lyme Disease patients and building a reputation for being one of the top Lyme specialists in the United States?

If he chose to retire, why not sell the practice and stay on as a consultant to reap the benefits of his years of hard work -- and I can tell you that this man worked as hard as any person I have ever seen.

So why did a man who was known never to back down from a fight suddenly throw in the towel this time around?

Unfortunately, I believe that I have the answer for you.

And I am not at all pleased about what happened to Dr. Burrascano, which is why I am posting this information here, even though the good doctor himself has refused to go into the details behind his premature retirement. I truly believe that the FBI and perhaps even the NSA and The Department Of Homeland Security may well share the responsibility for having put Dr. Burrascano out of business.

And I am not about to let yet another injustice by these modern day Nazi organizations go unnoticed.

Those of you who are familiar with my Website know that the FBI and NSA have been conducting their COINTELPRO operations against me for nearly 3o years and in doing so, have perpetrated some of the most outrageous violations of civil rights and due process of law ever documented.

It is my opinion that given the long-term illegal satellite spying that the FBI and NSA have been subjecting me to, that they picked up on information that could have been detrimental to Dr. Burrascano; information that in my opinion they used to coerce him to close his practice. This is in keeping with the FBI's maintenance of the status quo, and given that Dr. Burrascano's treatment protocol was more effective in putting Lyme patients into remission (as least some of them), the FBI sought to shut him down to appease the US Health Insurance Industry, as well as the American Medical Association, both of whom wanted Burrascano put out of business and neutralized with extreme prejudice, as retribution for the following statement that he made before the Senate Committee On Health in 1993.


The Lyme Disease Conspiracy by Joseph J. Burrascano, Jr., M.D.

Reprinted from Senate Committee Hearing on Lyme Disease August 5, 1993

There is a core group of university-based Lyme disease researchers and physicians whose opinions carry a great deal of weight. Unfortunately many of them act unscientifically and unethically. They adhere to outdated, self-serving views and attempt to personally discredit those whose opinions differ from their own. They exert strong ethically questionable influence on medical journals, which enables them to publish and promote articles that are badly flawed. They work with government agencies to bias the agenda of consensus meetings, and have worked to exclude from these meetings and scientific seminars those with alternate opinions. They behave this way for reasons of personal or professional gain, and are involved in obvious conflicts of interest.

This group promotes the idea that Lyme is a simple, rare illness that is easy to avoid, difficult to acquire, simple to diagnose, and easily treated and cured with 30 days or less of antibiotics.

The truth is that Lyme is the fastest growing infectious illness in this country after AIDS, with a cost to society measured in the billions of dollars. It can be acquired by anyone who goes outdoors, very often goes undiagnosed for months, years, or forever in some patients, and can render a patient chronically ill and even totally disabled despite what this core group refers to as "adequate" therapy. There have been deaths from Lyme disease.

They feel that when the patient fails to respond to their treatment regimens it is because the patient developed what they named "the post Lyme syndrome". They claim that this is not an infectious problem, but a rheumatologic or arthritic malady due to activation of the immune system.

The fact is, this cannot be related to any consistent abnormality other than persistent infection. As further proof, vaccinated animals whose immune system has been activated by Lyme have never developed this syndrome. On the other hand, there is proof that persistent infection can exist in these patients because the one month treatment did not eradicate the infection.

Indeed, many chronically ill patients, whom these physicians dismissed, have gone on to respond positively and even recover, when additional antibiotics are given.


It is interesting that these individuals who promote this so called "post-Lyme syndrome" as a form of arthritis, depend on funding from arthritis groups and agencies to earn their livelihood. Some of them are known to have received large consulting fees from insurance companies to advise them to curtail coverage for any antibiotic therapy beyond this arbitrary 30 day cutoff, even if the patient will suffer. This is despite the fact that additional therapy may be beneficial, and despite the fact that such practices never occur in treating other diseases.

Following the lead of this group of physicians, a few state health departments have even begun to investigate, in a very threatening way, physicians who have more liberal views on Lyme disease diagnosis and treatment than they do. Indeed, I must confess that I feel that I am taking a large personal risk here today by publicly stating these views, for fear that I may suffer some negative repercussions, despite the fact that many hundreds of physicians and many thousands of patients all over the world agree with what I am saying here. Because of this bias by this inner circle, Lyme disease is both under diagnosed and under treated, to the great detriment to many of our citizens. Let me address these points in more detail.

UNDERDIAGNOSIS

1. Under reporting: The current reporting criteria for Lyme are inadequate and miss an estimated 30 to 50% of patients. Some states curtailed their active surveillance programs and saw an artificial drop in reported cases of nearly 40%, leading the uninformed to believe incorrectly that the number of new cases of Lyme is on the decline. The reporting procedure is often so cumbersome, many physicians never bother to report cases. Some physicians have found themselves the target of state health department investigators. Finally, to many physicians and government agents rely on the notoriously unreliable serologic blood test to confirm the diagnosis.

2. Poor Lyme disease diagnostic testing: It is very well-known that the serologic blood test for Lyme is insensitive, inaccurate, not standardized, and misses up to 40 percent of cases, yet many physicians, including many of those referred to above, and the senior staff at CDC and NIH, insist that if the blood test is negative, then the patient could not possibly have Lyme. This view is not supported by the facts. Lyme is diagnosed clinically, and can exist even when the blood test is negative.

The Rocky Mountain Lab of the NIH, which is the country's best government laboratory for Lyme research had developed an excellent diagnostic test for this illness nearly 4 years ago, yet further work on it has been stalled due to lack of funding. Incredibly, if not for private donations of just $5,000 from the non-profit National Lyme Disease Foundation headquartered in Connecticut, then this research would have had to be abandoned. An additional $30,000 was donated by this organization to allow them to continue other valuable projects relating to vaccine development and disease pathogenesis. Yet, many physicians believe that thousands of dollars of grant moneys awarded by the government to other, outside researchers is poorly directed, supporting work of low relevance and low priority to those sick with Lyme. In spite of this, their funding continues, and the Rocky Mountain Lab is still underfunded.

3. The university and Government based Lyme establishment deny the existence of atypical presentations of Lyme and patients in this category are not being diagnosed or treated, and have no place to go for proper care.


RESULTS: Some Lyme patients have had to see, as many as 42 different physicians often over several years, and at tremendous cost, before being properly diagnosed. Unfortunately, the disease was left to progress during that time, and patients were left forever ill, for by that time, their illness was not able to be cured. Even more disturbing, these hard line physicians have tried to dismiss these patients as having "Lyme Hysteria" and tried to claim they all were suffering from psychiatric problems!


UNDER TREATMENT

1. Because the diagnosis is not being made, for reasons partly outlined above.

2. University based and government endorsed treatment protocols are empiric, insufficient, refer to studies involving inadequate animal models, and are ignorant of basic pharmacology. They are not based on honest systematic studies or on the results of newer information.

3. After short courses of treatment, patients with advanced disease rarely return to normal, yet many can be proven to still be infected and can often respond to further antibiotic therapy. Unfortunately, Lyme patients are being denied such therapy for political reasons and/or because insurance companies refuse to pay for longer treatment, upon the arbitrary and uninformed advice of these physicians, who are on the insurance company's payroll.

4. Long term studies on patients who were untreated or under treated demonstrated the occurrence of severe illness more than a decade later, reminiscent of the findings of the notorious Tuskeege Study, in which intentionally untreated syphilis patients were allowed to suffer permanent and in some cases fatal sequelae.

5. The Lyme bacterium spreads to areas of the body that render this organism resistant to being killed by the immune system and by antibiotics, such as in the eye, deep within tendons, and within cells. The Lyme bacterium also has a very complex life cycle that renders it resistant to simple treatment strategies. Therefore, to be effective, antibiotics must be given in generous doses over several months, until signs of active infection have cleared. Because relapses have appeared long after seemingly adequate therapy, long term followup, measured in years or decades, is required before any treatment regimen is deemed adequate or curative.

6. When administered by skilled clinicians, the safety of long term antibiotic therapy has been firmly established.

The very existence of hundreds of Lyme support groups in this country, and the tens of thousands of dissatisfied, mistreated and ill patients whom these groups represent, underscores the many problems that exist out in the real world of Lyme disease. I ask and plead with you to hear their voices, listen to their stories, and work in an honest and unbiased way to help and protect the many Americans whose health is at risk from what now has become a political disease. Thank you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By: Joseph J. Burrascano, Jr., M.D. 139 Springs Fireplace Road East Hampton, NY 11937