The Lyme Disease Wars
The Battle Over Diagnosis, Treatment, and Truth

About this book:

A mysterious cluster of arthritis cases in a sleepy Connecticut town ignites a fifty-year war that tore medicine apart. From the discovery of the stealthy spirochete to the courtroom where a state attorney general indicted the nation's top infectious disease society for antitrust violations, *The Lyme Disease Wars* exposes how a treatable infection became a battlefield where guidelines became weapons, doctors lost licenses for treating the desperate, and hundreds of thousands of patients were told their suffering was imaginary. This is the definitive account of a crisis that rewrote the rules of scientific dissent and revealed the terrifying fragility of medical consensus.

Inside the labs, the boardrooms, and the examination rooms where lives were shattered, award-winning investigation uncovers the two-tier testing trap that missed half the sick, the insurance algorithms that denied care to the dying, and the hidden biology—biofilms, persister cells, and a shadow epidemic of co-infections—that the standard of care refused to see. You'll witness the rise of patient activism that forced the CDC to confront its own failures, the failed vaccine that seeded a generation of distrust, and the eerie parallels now playing out in Long COVID and ME/CFS clinics worldwide.

Meticulously reported and fiercely even-handed, this book does more than chronicle a scandal—it illuminates a path forward. As climate change drives ticks into backyards from Canada to California, *The Lyme Disease Wars* delivers the urgent, riveting, and essential history that every patient, physician, and policymaker must read before the next epidemic arrives. The truth has been buried long enough.