The lost Lyme vaccine
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What is the background of Lyme disease and its significance?
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When I was learning how to make radio, I had a day job in the file room at my aunt's family medicine practice, just outside of San Francisco. They were old school and didn't really do computers. So there was just a pile of paper, taller than I was, of faxes, doctor's notes, checkups, prescriptions, just everything. And as I filed that mountain of paper, I saw the community that they had built at that doctor's office. The generations of families, visit after visit, living their lives, trusting their health and their loved ones with my aunt's care. So it resonates with me when Vijay Sikand describes his work as a family physician.
I take care of newborns to 90 and I say, stop at 90 because if you're 90, you don't need me.
Vijay has been a family doctor in a little town in Connecticut ever since he first drove up there with his wife in the 1980s.
And we fell in love with the place. It was a small, charming town where you have a couple of very nice inns on Main Street. And just, you know, it's a lovely spot right there on the Connecticut shoreline at the bottom of the Connecticut River.
But this town was special. the center of a newly uncovered disease that Vijay had only really read about in textbooks.
Old Lyme is the place where I started my practice of medicine. It's also the place where Lyme disease was first discovered in this country. And it's consumed much of my life.
The story of Lyme disease is long and winding. It's an old disease that's spread across much of the northern hemisphere. But in 1976, a Yale professor, Dr. Alan Steer, was the first to pin it down to ticks in Lyme, Connecticut, and give it its name. Over the last 50 years, Lyme disease has impacted millions of lives and has become one of the fastest-growing insect-spread diseases in the United States. But this isn't that story. This is Vijay's story of how a disease and the search for answers can become a career, a community, a life. I'm Meredith Hodnot, and this is Unexplainable.
So when did Lyme disease tip from like something that was kind of theoretical to becoming a part of your everyday life and your practice as a doctor?
Very quickly in the mid-1980s, when the media reports started to come out, there was there's a quite a lot of anxiety. So I started to get phone calls in my office almost every day. I almost spent an hour before going home at the end of the day returning phone calls from parents who asked me what to do about their kids' tick bites. And so all of a sudden, we had a snowballing of interest, anxiety, stress, need for understanding, diagnosis, and treatment.
How did it feel for you to be a family practice doctor, like you said, treating everybody from the infant to the grandma in the household and also be at this epicenter of Lyme disease in this country?
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Tell me. How often do you get to be a doctor and treat stuff that's not only – seems this new, but to be right in the middle of it. I mean, it's the kind of thing where if you made a phone call to a customer service agent and they asked you what your address was and you said Lyme, Connecticut, they said, oh, where the disease is, right?
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