More than 50 million Americans (and growing) are suffering in silence from a plague that’s hidden in plain sight—a 21st century pandemic of autoimmune and chronic illness that will only continue to increase without a paradigm shift.
Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/ May 12, 2020) is an eye-opening tour de force that exposes the autoimmune crisis that is ravaging America and beyond. By looking at the field of autoimmunity with new eyes, Steven Phillips, MD, and his former patient, Sony/ATV singer-songwriter Dana Parish, take on the medical establishment and examine the diseases that are disabling and killing people around the world.
Backed by a trove of published data, Chronic reveals striking evidence that a broad range of microbes, including the Lyme bacteria, cause a variety of recurrent conditions and autoimmune diseases—from fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, to depression, anxiety, and even Alzheimer’s. Most patients with these diseases are relegated to taking dangerous, expensive, long-term drugs that only (and often, poorly) manage symptoms. Chronic shows how the medical community has gotten things fatally wrong by ignoring blatant evidence of these chronic infections. Instead, in a scandal akin to Big Tobacco, we’ve become an immune-suppressed society, at risk for opportunistic infections and cancers, while Big Pharma makes billions. By synthesizing the science and research from the world’s top medical literature and experts, Chronic exposes the truth and outlines how the medical community has failed patients around the world.
Dr. Phillips was already an internationally renowned physician specializing in complex chronic diseases when he became a patient himself. After nearly dying from his own mystery illness, he experienced firsthand the medical community’s ignorance about the pathogens that underlie a deep spectrum of chronic conditions. Parish, too, watched her health spiral after twelve top doctors missed an underlying infection that caused heart failure and other sudden debilitating physical and psychiatric symptoms. Now, they’ve come together with a mission: to change the current model of simply treating symptoms and shift the focus to finding and curing root causes of these chronic diseases. By delving into the history and science behind common infections that are difficult to diagnose and treat, and debunking widely held beliefs by doctors and patients alike, Chronic shows how the medical community got it wrong and provides solutions that can empower readers to get their lives back.
Steven Phillips, M.D., is a world-renowned, Yale-trained physician, researcher, and international lecturer. A media go-to expert, he specializes in the management of complex vector-borne infections. He’s in private practice in Wilton, Connecticut.
Dana Parish is an award-winning Sony/ATV singer-songwriter who has collaborated with Celine Dion, Michael Jackson, and Nick Jonas. She has become a powerful voice for change in the field of Lyme disease. She lives in New York City.