Ross Douthat

RFK Jr., the head of HHS, has emphasized, right, I have a personal interest in chronic illness as someone who has had interesting longstanding encounter with the highly contested chronic form of Lyme disease.

When you talk about when, you know, the Trump administration talks about chronic illness as a category.

What kind of illnesses are you talking about?

What is the range?

I mean, one thing that was startling to me was realizing that there's a certain number of conditions where there's a label that just describes symptoms.

It doesn't describe origin or, you know, a theory of what's causing it, right?

So if someone tells you you have chronic fatigue syndrome, they're not like, oh, and we know, you know, what causes this and here's a treatment.

It's just like, no, this is a label that we put on a certain set of symptoms that we don't fully understand.

What do you think are the most plausible lines of research here?

When I listen to Secretary Kennedy, I think he places a really strong emphasis on pre-existing health of the patient, right?

And maybe it's connected to obesity, it's connected to diet, it's connected to exercise.

You need to sort of fix the terrain of the patient in order to bring them back to health.

In my own experience, I did not like find a dietary solution to Lyme disease.

I took insane levels of antibiotics for a very long period of time, treated it basically as an active infection.

And that was in the end successful in terms of getting the condition under control.

So I have a bias towards the idea that a lot of chronic illnesses might have sort of a direct cure

Anyway, I'm just curious where you think the most promising lines of research are.

To me, the key thing is- I should say, it's really hard for me, and again, this is my sympathy for the skeptics of chronic Lyme.

It's really hard for me to look at my own experience and come up with a randomized controlled trial set of experiments.

It's like, oh, we're going to randomize control trial someone taking six different antibiotics for four and a half years.