"Doctor, bugs are crawling in my skin, sending out fibers, releasing secretions! Look at these awful sores—something's alive in them."
The plea may sound straight out of a sci-fi movie, but for some people, it's a sensation they face every day. And it's an experience they share with me.
As a tropical medicine specialist, my toughest challenge is not what you might imagine—a returning traveler afflicted with malaria, amebiasis, or dengue fever. Those are serious illnesses, but I know how to diagnose and treat them.
Instead, the patients who haunt me are the ones who believe they are infested with parasites, and—according to everything I know—are not. For decades, dermatologists, psychiatrists, and other specialists have called their condition delusional parasitosis. Today some sufferers are pursuing a new label: Morgellons disease. Not long ago, I saw my first case.
It began with an urgent request from a colleague of mine that ...
