American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - The Mysterious Origins of Lyme Disease | Ross Douthat

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

This week’s American Alchemist is Ross Douthat: Ross is an American political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of elite education and Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society. On this episode, we talk about his battle with Lyme disease and its mysterious origins. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, Ross. Welcome to Connecticut. Meet our guests today. New York Times op-ed columnist and best-selling author Ross Dowford. Thank you for coming all the way across the country. Ross has written books on various topics ranging from the sad state of our elite education system to technological stagnation and social decadence in the U.S. He even wrote a book about the Catholic Church. Basically all topics you want to steer clear of at dinner parties. But Ross is not really one for controversy. He likes to stay out of the limelight.

Well, at least out of the light. Unfortunately, Ross contracted Lyme disease in 2015 and suffered from persistent symptoms for years. I was sleeping one hour a night. I had been to the emergency room like five or six times. When nothing in traditional medicine worked for Ross, he turned to the Rife machine, a low-energy electromagnetic field generation,

invented by mid-century American scientist Royal Rife. He documented this whole experience in his forthcoming book In the Deep Places. As most New Englanders will tell you, ticks that carry Lyme disease are about as prevalent in the region as Dunkin' Donuts. The core is Connecticut, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vine, the Hudson Valley.

So why is this disease so common in this one place and where did it all come from? Let's take it back to 1975. at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center off the coast of Long Island. There's a chance that Lyme disease, at least the current version of it, is a product of a U.S. Cold War era bio-warfare program. Willie Bergdorfer, a scientist with known ties to U.S. bioweapons research, was experimenting with tick-borne illnesses on Plum Island.

The bacterial component of Lyme disease is even named after Willie. Just adding to the conspiracy, there was a big uptick in Lyme in 1975, with Plum Island being the epicenter of cases. Regardless of its origin, natural or artificial, Lyme disease really fucks with your ability to function. I would have this incredible and bizarre urge to run around, strip off my shirt to rub my chest. So forget everything you know about politics, culture, and traditional medicine, and enjoy our conversation with today's American alchemist, Ross Dowler. How's it going?

Good. How are you? Thank you for having me in your beautiful house. You're welcome, thank you, for coming all the way across the country. Absolutely. No, I was really excited to do it. You have a new book out. What motivated you to write The Deep Places?

So, well, so this is a book about the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. About six years ago now, my wife and I were living in Washington, D.C., we had this idea, this fantasy, that we were going to move back to New England. Just as we were making an offer on this place, I had a little red mark. a swelling on a lymph node on my neck. Suddenly it felt like the symptoms were all over my body and just got worse and worse and worse. I just went from doctor to doctor,

and nobody could figure out what it was. By the time we moved to Connecticut, I had lost 40 pounds, was sleeping one hour a night, had been to the emergency room like five or six times. The first people I saw in Connecticut all said, you know, this seems like Lyme disease. The official narrative was that it could be dealt with

by taking antibiotics at any point along the way. So I sort of stabilized, but then I still didn't get better. And so I became what the Centers for Disease Control calls post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, which is to say, we think you had Lyme disease, we gave you two weeks or three weeks of antibiotics, you didn't get better, but we think you don't have Lyme disease anymore. You have some weird sequel that we don't understand. Either it's a psychosomatic condition or it's an autoimmune condition. The more serious take is the theory that post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome is some kind of autoimmune condition, right? Where you have an infection, you get triggered, your immune system gets triggered, it overreacts and it keeps overreacting indefinitely even after the pathogen itself has been dealt with, whether by the drugs or your own immune system.

But then there is a minority of doctors who say, well, look, if you have someone who has a set of symptoms and you treat the symptoms and they don't go away and they just continue, they probably have the same, just have the same disease and you should continue treating them for longer. And to put it mildly, their work is incredibly controversial. At the peak, it was like, you know, you would take 12 antibiotics in a day and probably 30 supplements of everything from serapeptase, to oil of oregano. Oh, wow. That would be a not unusual chronic Lyme patient's herbal medical cabinet. And how has your experience with Lyme sort of changed your overall orientation towards the Western medical establishment?

So I'd say in some ways, it's maybe even a defense of it because it's like we just need to take antibiotics and be more rigorous about testing and maybe a lot of it's the pattern matching the fact that these Connecticut sort of local doctors just had experience prior. But antibiotics sort of do work, at least in terms of getting you back to the baseline, and then the way in which it might be somewhat of a refutation is, although you go through a lot of snake oil that doesn't work, you find something called the Rife machine, which, you know, is not really necessarily well respected by like the American medical establishment,

but it empirically just seems to work well on you. The simplest explanation for how it works is that it's creating a frequency that shakes and shatters bacteria in the way that an opera singer's voice at a particular note can shatter glass. And then the other thing was magnet therapy. These were experiments in territory where there are posited physical explanations for everything that's going on. But they are physical explanations that don't fit certainly into the biochemical approach that Western medicine and Western doctors generally use and definitely don't have the kind of double-blind, controlled placebo-involved trial model right behind them.

They're based on, you know, sort of scattered experiments and a lot of anecdot. All modern diagnosis aids are at the disposal of the medical stuff. We were talking earlier about this Flexner report. In 1908, there's this report. Before that, a third of the doctors were homeopaths, osteopaths, and electromagnetic fieldwork of the body. The one way in which I might be slightly conspiratorial is it does feel like after that most of the treatments are assumed kind of on the biochemical level and that is better for business. Say if, you know, we do find an answer around the Rife machine. Royal Rife was a little

conspiratorial about his work being marginalized. Yep. You know, that all of a sudden becomes this great open source thing and, you know, everybody can treat each other on the electromagnetic field and, you know, there's less room for big pharma. The thing with Lyme disease, though, specifically, right, is that, like, nobody's making huge profits off Lyme disease treatment of any kind. The goal of biomedical research is to find, you know, the pill that you can take that makes you feel better, right? Whereas, you know, yeah, if it were actually the case that you could treat lots of things

without drugs at all, right? then you get into territory where the sort of existing stake is obvious. In certain ways, the strangest thing about it, once you have this chronic problem and you start talking to people about it, you realize that it's sort of like a secret handshake. If you say to someone in rural Connecticut or suburban Connecticut, oh, I have what I think is Lyme disease and I can't get better, they say, oh, well, that happened to my sister. And she was sick for two years before she saw this weird doctor in Bridgeport, who helped or oh yeah my wife you know was diagnosed with brain cancer and we thought she was dying for two months

and then it turned out to be Lyme disease and yet even though this is happening to the rich well-educated and media savvy it doesn't seem to have any effect on this sort of official establishment conventional wisdom about the disease which is that if you have it for six months or a year after treatment, it's not real. You're probably, you know, yeah, in the best case, you have an autoimmune problem in the worst case, you have a psychosomatic or a mental condition. We're going to have a whole lot of long-haul COVID survivors as well. And, you know, it's going to be somewhat similar where it's, you know, it's going to be hard to sort of diagnose, you know, is it from the COVID, you know, what's going on? Right. The long-term stuff sort of creeps up.

as a cultural phenomenon. Like it takes years and decades before people realize, oh, wait, there's really tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who seem to have these long-term symptoms. COVID being a very different kind of disease, it happened much more quickly. And you also had, I think, more doctors and nurses having this sort of direct encounter because they were on the front line. So you had more people sort of inside the medical world getting chronic COVID themselves. And that combination, I think, has made it, there's definitely sort of more attention paid to long-haul COVID than to other chronic conditions. And I think it's taken more immediately seriously or has been than chronic Lyme was. And there is, you don't take a hard stance on this.

You just, I think, think it's worthy of exploration. But there is a popular narrative that Lyme's disease either came from or really was amplified by a war. warfare experimentation in the United States. There is that narrative, yes. Weaponized ticks loaded with Lyme disease, for real. In fact, it's so for real. Congress is looking into this. If you look at a map of the spread of Lyme disease in the northeastern United States,

it looks like sort of half a bullseye, right? Because it's the East Coast, so the other half would be the Atlantic Ocean. And the epicenter, the center of that bullseye would be an area around southern Connecticut, northern Long Island, and the, you know, Nantucket, Martha's vineyard areas. And right there at the center is Plum Island, which is a small island in the Long Island Sound that remains and has been since World War II a U.S. Bio-Worfare Laboratory. And it's very strange. Strange in the same way that, you know, The fact that the coronavirus started in Wuhan, China, which happened to be the site of a Institute for Virology, studying coronaviruses, was strange.

We do know they did some research on ticks there, but what we know is that it was other kinds of ticks, but it included some other ticks that may be able to carry Lyme disease. And there's no sort of fully definite theory for how this kind of escape. would have worked, right? Basically, the idea would be you get seabirds flying into the pens of the animals that they're experimenting on and then carrying the ticks back to Connecticut or a long island. Between ticks and mosquitoes, there's no reason to go insane. Decadent society came out, was it three weeks or something before the pandemic hit? Yeah, I don't know if that was good timing for the purposes of selling books.

It should have been called the, you know, collapse of civilization or something I think would have looked more pressure. Well, in a way, it sort of, it showed the decadence and then maybe it sort of took us out of the decadence as well in a weird way, as you define it being sort of a malaise and general slowdown. If you were to rewrite decadent society in light of the pandemic, what would you change about it? I'd probably focus, spend more time talking about public institutions and their sclerosis. Both Congress and the Federal Reserve, in the United States did actually do sweeping and dramatic things in response to the highly unusual pandemic circumstances the place where sort of institutional

sclerosis was most manifest were and still is now in the FDA and CDC and sort of the the medical bureaucracy the reality that we had the vaccine like right away which is remarkable yeah but I think some kind of human challenge trials and expedited expedited provisional approval, right-to-try kind of things, could have gotten you a lot more vaccination at least a few months earlier in ways that might have headed off the Delta wave and saved a lot of lives. And yeah, and then America's ability to contain the virus initially was totally hobbled by those bureaucracies. Another kind of bizarre transmutation of the religious impulse that you write about in decadent

society are UFOs and aliens. The Pentagon now sort of says there are things in the sky. know what they are. Yeah, there's obviously they sort of contain it to that. Yeah, the report that they released was extremely disappointing. It was this. Yeah. Do you have an opinion on what's going on there? I have no definite views on the subject. I have a lot of ideas. Human beings have experiences, spiritual experiences that fall into what you might call the trickster category. Pre-1947, certainly pre-1847, those get classified as, you know, sort of encounters with the gods if you're in a pagan society, encounters with fairies in many cases, if you're in a Western society.

They sort of fits into this zone between heaven and hell in a Christian cosmology. And then at a certain point, you start to have sort of UFO alien encounters as space sort of starts to loom as a place. but definitely after 47 you get a shift and people who would have come home and said, oh, the fairies carried me away to the, you know, to the mountain and showed me the pot of gold. Now come back and say, the little gray men carried me off and experimented.

Yeah. If you're a total skeptic, you would say, well, you know, people have hallucinations and weird experiences and make up stories and so on. If you're less of a skeptic, you would say, well, maybe there are beings out there that don't fall into any existing classification

and so we sort of classify them based on our current cultural experience. Whereas in the world where you actually find an alien spaceship, then you're in the Alpha Centauri world. And I feel like the Pentagon stuff, the stuff in the sky, sort of falls in an uneasy ground between those two territories, right? It's like more sort of physicalized and overt than a sort of, you know, person getting abducted by aliens in the Montana wilderness. Yes. But it's not, it's still sort of weirder and harder to pin down than, again, like, the sort of Roswell idea that an alien craft crash landed and we've been studying it ever since. Right. Which is a long way of saying, I'm very interested in it, but I don't know what to make of it.

You wrote the book Privilege, both about your experience at Harvard and as sort of a more macro criticism of the decline of the university. COVID could have been a watershed moment around universities. You still have sky high tuition. All of a sudden, you have a year where kids are at home. The pitch used to be, well, there's something kind of ineffable or intangible about being on campus. There really is no other pitch. I guess probably both of our opinions at this point, maybe. And so what do you think about that?

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Overall, pre-COVID, you would say that what's happening with universities is similar to what's in journalism. Because of declining birth rates, there are fewer kids to attend a sort of very large system of higher education. And a lot of schools are going to close or, you know, get poorer. And the sort of core properties, the Ivy League schools, the big state schools and so on, are positioned to come through this transition effectively and become in certain ways more powerful than ever, which I think is what's happened in journalism. That would be my, fundamentally pessimistic take, right? That like if you think, you know, if you if you look at the higher ed and say, God, the US News and World Report rankings never change and Harvard and Yale are always

on top and there's no dynamism and innovation in the sector, it's actually going to get worse as the number of available students declines because the existing players will become more powerful. And I think there are for now just some sort of fundamental limits to how people learn digitally and on Zoom and so on. People do actually want the in-person experience. And that being said, like, until the universities come, I mean, come out of COVID successfully, they aren't really offering that. These liberal arts schools that, where everyone is vaccinated and yet they're still totally locked down, and it seems insane. Like, who is paying $70,000 to go to Connecticut college and, like, live in, you know, live in Australia? It seems like something,

maybe more dynamic and innovative could come out of that, but I don't know exactly what. I think the zone, the more plausible zone for educational innovation, though, is like middle school and high school, actually, because I think it's easier to do something smaller there. Like, you can't compete with Harvard, but you probably can compete with your local public and private school. If I were a would be disruptor investing in educational alternatives, I would look maybe more at high school than at college right now. Where do you think populist politics go?

So 2008, you're a grand new party, where you talk about populists sort of moving back and forth and not really having a home and you kind of suggest maybe the GOP should provide them a home on a go-forward basis in a way, however crude he did it. That happened. That happened. That's what happened. Yeah. And so I think it happened sort of under Trump.

And then Biden, he's from Scranton, but he doesn't really feel sort of populist. where do the populists go currently? I think Biden has not that successfully channeled populist energy in his style of politics, partially because he's so old and partially because he's operating within a political party that, you know, is the party of the anti-populist establishment. Still, in terms of his policies, there has actually been a certain kind of continuity where, you know, some of less so on immigration, but even there, they're sort of trying to grope their way back

probably to some Trump, some of the stay in Mexico policies. But on trade, they've maintained some Trump era policies. On China, they've maintained, you know, or sort of expanded certain forms of, you know, attempted hawkish realignment in Asia. The pullout from Afghanistan, as disastrously as it went, And the fact that Biden actually did that was it was the definition of a populist act. He was doing something supported by the majority of Americans and opposed by the majority

of American foreign policy elites. It's in both parties now. And it's not the Biden administration is not just a sort of administration of, you know, the sort of liberal globalist elite. It's also trying to do things that sort of learn from the Trump experience. And there isn't a lot of evidence that the Republican. party is ready to like take the next step. And it seems like the Republicans are divided between people who really just want to go back to the party as it was before Trump and people

who are really into like Trump related cultural grievance as opposed to a fuller populism. And I don't know who the post-Trump leader of the populists would be. And if there is one, they're not going to get the chance to lead, I think, until Trump runs again and either wins or Yeah, on that note, should we try the rife machine? If that is what you want, that is what we can do. I would love to. Ross dusted off his rife machine and let me have a go at it. There it is.

Wow, it's so cool. This is, in fact, a rife machine that you can purchase online. Yeah, now it's all suitably insane. These are the frequencies for perhaps you would like to normalize your blood pressure. Sure. Bubonic plague or leprosy. You know, suffer from... I do.

Luckily, I would do something from my stomach. I don't know. Well, let's see if... Or gastritis and fletus. Yeah. Why not? Why not? This is cool.

Where do you feel it? Like, cut it through my stomach, but also my, like, solar plex. It's like a lower chest. We then took our conversation to the beautiful woodlands surrounding his home. Nice. suitable woodland path. Oh, that's great. But also nicely graveled, so we're actually in no danger from the enemy. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Do you think we're seeing a rise of autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses that are somewhat psychosomatic and based on just the general malaise

and decline that you describe sociologically? Part of me thinks yes. Part of me, though, having had this experience, is really skeptical. Like, I have a very very very very very. visceral reaction to psychogenic theories of illness, even though obviously they have to be true in certain cases, right? But, you know, whenever someone says, ah, you know, it's long COVID is psychogenic for these reasons. I'm inclined to stand up for the long COVIDers. And of course, obviously even saying something is psychogenic doesn't actually mean like, oh, you can just get rid of it through willpower or something. Right. It's obviously like, it's much more complicated than that.

And psychogenic illnesses need to be treated and taken seriously no less than one's caused by actual pathogens. With Lyme, too, you get this constant phenomenon where people are diagnosed with other things. It then turns out to be Lyme, right? Like one of the women who treated me, her husband was diagnosed with Lugarig's disease. And they said, all right, you've got a few years to live. And he remembers. We remained sick, but didn't die and turned out to have Lyme disease and it was treated. But that too makes you wonder like, you know, about sort of the range of misdiagnosis around

all kinds of conditions. Yeah. Yes. That we don't fully understand. I thoroughly checked myself for tick bites afterwards, thanked Ross for his time, and mold over these important questions. Was Lyme disease the product of gain of function research? the Rife Machine help with chronic ailments? Leave a comment with what you think. I'm Jesse Michaels,

and this is American Alchemy.