Traveler! that's him
he is magnificent imo!
Ok hopefully this is ok but I'm going to paste the text from the article here. Feel free to delete my post if that is not kosher!
Here goes:
The moral and scientific quagmire surrounding early deaths in contact sports just got stickier, bigger and more complex.
For a decade, brain injuries have been a legitimate concern, with leagues, colleges and loved ones facing the possibility that repetitive, high-speed body contact shortens a player’s life. It’s prompted new rules, safer equipment and an emphasis on the proper diagnosis and treatment of concussions.
Despite that, it’s still a problem.
Now comes retired physician Dr. Alfred Miller of San Antonio, with information that makes the problem more confusing with evidence that chameleon bacteria, blood-sucking parasites, questionable lab tests, misdiagnosis and false positives can play a big part in the problem before us.
Simply put, ticks and Lyme disease could be making people so sick, they appear to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known as ALS) or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (known as CTE), two neurodegenerative diseases thought to be caused by the physical collisions in hockey, football, and soccer.
Oh yeah. In a bit of macabre irony, Miller and some Boston researchers suggest — via different narratives — baseball Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig didn’t die of the disease that unofficially carries his name.
But Miller, being both gentleman and scholar, has an answer. He can’t cure anything, but he has a solution to the dilemma that he has brought forth.
His suggestions come amidst continued emphasis on brain injuries in sports, a problem that’s costing lives and money across the country. The NFL recently agreed to a $780 million settlement with the NFL Players Association.
While demand for the NFL remains high, supply is taking a hit — high school and Pop Warner participation has been trending downward for a decade.
Our story begins in 1977, when Allen Steer, a Tufts University researcher, announced the discovery of Lyme disease. Named after the city of Lyme, Connecticut, which sits in the middle of a region where ticks are plentiful and hungry, the illness was probably around for centuries but never identified. Left untreated, Lyme disease can turn into a neurological disease.
Jump ahead to 2005, when Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu made the link between CTE and football players involved in collisions, a story that’s the basis for the movie “Concussion.”
Before then, many football players were diagnosed with ALS, which destroys neurons and slowly destroys muscles in a fashion that’s similar to CTE.
There are doctors who suspect Gehrig, whose name is associated with ALS, might have actually suffered from CTE. And Miller points out Gehrig played minor league hockey in Lyme, aka “Tick Central,” and ultimately kept a holiday home there.
Miller was drawn into the issue when his daughter-in-law, living in Boston, was diagnosed with ALS in 2008. What followed was a frustrating year of tests and treatments, culminating in the pronouncement, from some of the top doctors in the field, that she had four months to live.
During that year, Miller had rolled up his sleeves and researched spirochetes, the tiny bacteria that are responsible for lots of life-threatening diseases. One of them, for example, causes syphillis, which is sometimes called “the great imitator” because it can disguise itself as other diseases. The only way to nail it, Miller said, is to test for it specifically. That led Miller to looking at Lyme disease.
As we sat in his Alamo Heights home office last week, I interrupted to ask Miller if a simple Lyme disease test would find the problem.
“Wait,” he said. “This will blow your mind.”
The main Lyme test, endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control, is only right half of the time, Miller said, often giving false-positives. What’s worse, Miller discovered, is that two key markers on a Lyme spirochete are traditionally ignored in those tests.
A frustrated Miller took over his daughter-in-law’s care in 2009 and began an intensive antibiotic treatment. That’s no day at the beach either, he said, since it takes months and the pain of toxins leaving a person’s system is sometimes more painful than the disease.
Ultimately, she was Lyme-free and lived for another five years. She died last February from other causes. Her health wasn’t restored during those five years, Miller said, since one of the tragic side-effects is that even if the disease is controlled, the nerve damage is irreversible.
Miller has run across the identical scenario with dozens of others over the years. He always suggests the antibiotic regime associated with Lyme when people have been given an ALS death sentence by their personal physicians. In most cases, Miller says, the person later reported to him that they were cured.
Miller has tons of literature — and I’ve read abstracts of some of it online in various medical journals — that Lyme is often misdiagnosed among populations that find themselves outdoors, in grass or fields. Miller refers to those jobs as the grassy occupations. And in the case of football and soccer players, he calls them the grassy sports.
I had some problems at this point, because I’ve played outdoor sports for more than 50 years. And while I’ve had my share of red bugs and mosquitoes, I’ve never encountered a tick.
There are studies, Miller responded, that most people with tick infestations only notice it later and rarely remember when the parasite attached itself.
Miller’s suggestion is a simple one.
Make blood tests mandatory, beginning at a young age, for athletes. Give the tests every year. And make sure that the proper type of Lyme screening is used.
That’s a great idea. School districts, colleges, and pro leagues make billions off of their respective players. It won’t kill the budgets of athletic departments or NFL teams to foot the bill for effective Lyme testing, but failing to do it might kill players.