When Medicine Stops Knowing How to Help
In hindsight, it began in childhood — at a summer camp in 1980, when a tick bite left me with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF). At the time, almost no one knew what Lyme was. The camp doctor brushed it off as the flu, and the infections were left to quietly take root.
I was seven and trusted medicine completely. I believed doctors had the answers — so much so that I later built a career in pharmaceutical sales on that same faith.
By 1990, I was a teenager with a fever that wouldn’t end — three months of pretending I was fine. My pediatrician finally found the cause: “just Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever(RMSF).” Back then, there was no red tape, no insurance battle — just a blood draw and a clear result.
But the result didn’t change anything. Because the fever had lasted so long, the doctor said the treatment wouldn’t help now. No medication. No follow-up. Just the relief of a label and the hollow silence that came after it.
My friends and I joked about it — “FUO,” Fever of Unknown Origin, sounded like a band name. None of us understood what it meant. No one asked about tick bites, and no one mentioned Lyme or Co-Infections. It didn’t feel important then.
That summer at camp had already given me other clues: newly pierced ears that swelled until they swallowed the earrings whole, and an old scar between my brows that throbbed like a headache, but different. My parents didn’t think much of it — they assumed the swelling was from metal sensitivity — and no one wondered why it happened. But that was where my body was vulnerable. The immune system always whispers before it shouts.
Eventually, the fever passed, but the test — like so many that would follow — changed nothing. It only confirmed I was sick. In 1990, medicine still didn’t see these infections as serious. Nobody realized what leaving them untreated could mean.
When the System Stopped Looking
Decades later, when I became too sick to work and needed those same tests again — or risked being labeled delusional — the ground had shifted. The diagnostics my pediatrician once ordered so easily were no longer available in New York State. Entire panels for tick-borne disease had been stripped from state labs.
I paid private labs out of pocket and finally got the proof: black-and-white results confirming what my body had been saying for years. But even with that proof, the medical system largely shrugged. No one knew what to do. No one claimed me — until one doctor finally did, stepping in after we’d been swindled. He’s stayed like a guardian angel from afar ever since, still trying in earnest to help.
To this day, finding an affordable local primary-care doctor is impossible. The moment they start taking my history, I can see it — the subtle shift when they realize it’s too complex, too time-consuming, not worth what insurance will pay.
“Try concierge medicine,” they suggest. “Those guys have all the new tech.”
I want to ask if they’d like to pitch in a few thousand dollars a month — but usually I just nod.
The House in Queens
He told us to come around to the back of the residential house — down to a make shift basement office with sliding glass doors. My sister, Tara, drove in from Long Island, picked me up in Manhattan, and we crawled through Queens traffic in a downpour. The sky was gray and swollen, the air thick with that storm smell that makes everything feel like a warning. Tara kept her focus on the road, the sound of rain and my muffled whimpers filling the car.
The parasitologist PHD had been recommended by Richard — the author of a book called How to Get Your Life Back — a man with good intentions who was also working with me as a health coach. He believed this doctor might help. I was desperate enough to hope.
Later, horrified by what had happened, Richard removed the doctor’s name from all future editions of his book.
Inside, the doctor held my face in his hands — the first professional who had actually examined and touched me in months — and looked close enough to actually see me.
“Ah,” he said softly. “I recognize the devil working in your skin.”
That was my introduction to a different kind of medicine: fresh specimens examined under a microscope on a dining table, real organisms moving on the slide. It was the first time anyone had found anything that made sense — and the first time I realized how far I’d fallen out of the mainstream system.
When Mainstream Medicine Shuts the Door
I didn’t end up in a creepy Queens basement because it sounded appealing. I ended up there because mainstream medicine refused to test me — yet also refused to believe me without tests — and, eventually, refused to even look at me.
And I wasn’t someone predisposed to distrust the system. I believed in medicine. I even sold it. But when it came to my own body, the door was repetitively slammed in my face.
This is the context few people see: patients don’t wake up one day and decide to hand strangers thousands in cash for hope — or to stay sick forever. They’re funneled there by a system that withholds the very diagnostics it requires to treat them.
Welcome to modern medicine.
The Diagnostics Felt Real
He examined several fresh specimens, identified and pointed out organisms and infections, and diagnosed toxoplasmosis along with a list of other parasites — correctly. I don’t believe his microscopy work was wrong. He was an accredited parasitologist in Nigeria. Most alluring was for the first time, I had answers that lined up with my real exposures — a sick puppy with Giardia who’d bitten me, an adult bed bug that also broke the skin, and a Situation on my scalp after a zip lining trip through a forest in Haiti.
It all made sense. The infections felt like they’d been stacking inside me for decades — childhood Lyme and RMSF left untreated, attracting new organisms and viruses, piling on until my body broke and my skin erupted.
The contradiction was stark: legitimate findings in an illegitimate setting.
Specimens, Cash, and Creepiness
We returned three times. Each visit meant more specimen evaluation, more cash—handed over before treatment or leaving. My family paid, convinced this was my only path forward.
It was a strange mix of hope and dread: real-seeming diagnostics in a basement, money exchanged like a back-alley deal. Every instinct said this is wrong. Desperation said try anyway.
The Juices: Snake Oil at $20,000
Then came the prescribed “treatments.”
Alongside the parasite tests were $20,000 in “juice therapies,” marketed and sold through a partner 'clinic' in Texas, along with mysterious black bags of IV infusions, and foul-smelling poultices.
I told them I couldn’t keep anything down. I couldn't do their Juices. Their answer scared my family into committing:
“You’ll have to if you ever want to get well.”
The juices made me violently ill. Boxes remained stacked in my apartment, unrefrigerated and rotting—a monument to fear and manipulation.
The ER — and the Disappearance
Before ending up back in ER, he had done three infusions — right there on his couch. I still don’t know what was in them. By then, I could barely walk from the car to the door, so I wasn’t questioning anything that might help.
It was the second year of unrelenting facial pain — a period when some of the best hospitals in New York were treating me as though I were mutilating my own flesh. I never had. My skin had always been my healthiest feature; the idea that I’d suddenly destroy it was absurd.
My family knew I’d never pick my skin. Most people aren’t as lucky. Their families believe the reckless claims that this is all self-inflicted. That belief — or the lack of one — can change the course of a patient’s life.
When the pain became unbearable, Tara drove me straight to the ER. I was barely holding myself together. From there, we called him. Tara’s voice was unsteady but fierce. She asked what exactly he had infused into my arm — what was in the poultice he’d pressed against my face — and why I was in so much more pain.
The line went dead. We called back; He didn’t answer. He never did again.
One moment, he was an expert who had looked me in the eye and named what was happening. The next, he was gone — just a man practicing out of a Queens basement, likely without a license, who vanished the moment accountability appeared.
The microscope work may have been real. The toxoplasmosis was accurate. But the infusions, the poultice, the juices, the exorbitant money — those were part of something else entirely. And that night in the ER, I understood: truth and exploitation can live in the same room.
What Drives Patients Underground
This isn’t a one-off story. Across the world, patients with chronic infections are living their own versions of it right now. People with Lyme disease, Morgellons, and parasitic illnesses are pushed out of mainstream care, told their symptoms are imaginary, and left to search for anyone willing to look.
They’re shut out of testing, denied treatment, and forced into unregulated spaces where science, scam, and despair can blur together. Sometimes the science is real — my labs were accurate. Sometimes it’s pure exploitation — like the $20,000 of juices that rotted in my apartment because there was no place to store them and they were utter nonsense as a sustainable protocol.
This is the real scandal: certainly not that patients turn to alternative medicine, but that mainstream systems have abandoned them so completely that often basements and “miracle cures” become the only feasible options left.
The Bigger Picture: A Global Diagnostics Gap
That experience, occurring in NYC with some of the top hospitals nationally, is evidence of a much larger crisis. Globally, nearly half the world’s population lacks access to basic diagnostic testing — including for parasitic and tick-borne diseases, cancers, and other chronic conditions.
In the U.S., the barriers look different but cause the same devastation. Where available, current standard Lyme disease testing is notoriously unreliable in early infection, with antibodies taking weeks to appear. Published studies put early test sensitivity as low as 30–40%. That diagnostic blind spot drives patients to seek out anyone — and anywhere — willing to look as soon as they sense something is wrong.
Research confirms that patients with chronic or rare illnesses face average diagnostic delays of nearly five years according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders. Those years of limbo aren’t neutral — they’re where disease progresses, credibility erodes, and trust in medicine collapses.
When legitimate testing is stripped, denied, or delayed, people self medicate with drugs, alcohol or buy into marketing ploys aimed at this vulnerable group; buy it privately hoping the lab is legitimate. They send samples overseas. They pay thousands to the known specialty labs. And too often, the real findings will either disappoint or come bundled with dangerous nonsense — a toxic pairing of truth and exploitation that fills the vacuum mainstream medicine leaves behind.
The Painful Irony
The irony isn’t lost on me. I once sold medicine for a living. I believed in it. I trusted it.
But when Lyme disease and its co-infections derailed my life, the system didn’t just fail to help — it often refused to look. And when it finally did, it was totally unprepared for what it found.
I’m not saying every alternative clinic is a scam, or that every conventional path is useless. I’m saying that diagnostic access is the fault line — the place where the system either intervenes or abandons.
If we fix that — if we ensure affordable, clinically sound diagnostics are widely available early — fewer patients will end up with myterious basement IV infusions, with boxes of useless juices, strange poultices, and disappearing experts.
Because the truth is simple: Nobody chooses desperation. They’re cornered into it.
The Real Cost of Desperation
I still have those labs and diagnoses sitting in files. I still feel the way he held my face in his hands and said he recognized “the devil in my skin.” I remember Tara intensely gripping the wheel in the rain, sensing her fear; the cartons of juice stacked in my apartment, the ER calls never returned.
Parts of it were real. He is a parasitologist, and his microscopy work caught infections others had missed or ignored. But parts of it were snake oil — designed to drain money from a terrified family. That blend of truth and exploitation is what makes stories like this so dangerous, and so hard to see clearly in the moment.
I once believed medicine without question. I even sold it for a living. But when debilitating cases of Lyme disease and chronic infections are denied, dismissed, or erased, that trust collapses.
This should never be the choice: ignored by the system, or exploited outside of it.
No one should have to end up in a basement or back alley chasing answers for anything medical.
That’s why Megan’s Miracle exists — to make sure patients have somewhere to turn for Apitherapy, integrative approaches, and ongoing coaching when traditional medicine stops knowing how to help or even how to Listen.
Author’s Note
I live this reality every day. Lyme and its co-infections have stolen my health, my daily life, my identity and sometimes even my voice—but not my fire.
I write for everyone who has been gaslit, silenced, or told their suffering isn’t real. I’ve seen what hides beneath denial. I’ve seen the monsters under the microscope.
I’ve survived what should have ended me. That survival—our survival—is the crucial evidence.
Together with Megan’s Miracle and a few extraordinary practitioners, I keep fighting: for further research, for recognition, and for hope.
Western medicine may deny these illnesses exist, but we know better.
We know because we battle it with every breath.
The truth endures. And so do we.
Meredith Finegold
Writer • Health Coach • Advocate • Patient–Warrior
Just a couple of silly geese. Best Big Sister- Thank you. ❤️