Ms Kerry Lawless:

I do not understand it either and I am not a clinician. From what I have learned through having Lyme disease and getting treatment, there does not seem to be anything in the disease itself that would lead to this. It seems to be an institutional barrier. I was not joking when I said people are insisting the world is flat as that is what it feels like as a patient reading research and looking at evidence, with fellow patients getting better after treatment while still being told they were never sick in the first place. Our Taoiseach has spoken about this and described us as vulnerable people being taken advantage of by this foreign testing. The idea is we are being psychologically geared up to believe we have this mystery disease rather than just accepting there are mental health issues or chronic fatigue. I have never heard another group of patients described like this. It has happened in the history of science as multiple sclerosis patients were called hysterics before the CT scanner was invented. We are not the only group of patients this has happened to but I am thankful it is a rare occurrence. I am not thankful for the fact that clinicians do not argue about the science but rather they talk about overseas labs being uncredited and that these poor, vulnerable patients are being taken advantage of. They argue it is a mental health issue.