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45 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M attempt to discuss Morgellons Disease, although the dodgy internet connection at one of their ends keeps getting in the way...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Technical Challenges in Podcasting
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello there, and welcome to another episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I have to say, this episode was a chore to record because we had numerous cutouts, cases of lags, and unusual background noise, as you might be hearing now, although that's because I'm boiling some potatoes for tonight's dinner.
00:00:22
Speaker
As such, the recording you are about to listen to is largely reconstructed from the moments where things were largely working. As such, there are the occasional jumps and leaps of logic, which you might expect from the podcast's guide to the conspiracy, but in this particular case, sometimes we're simply dealing with the audio that worked out. Listen and try to enjoy.
00:00:50
Speaker
So, Joshua, it has come to my attention that you have unsightly tendrils and fibres sprouting all over your body. You mean my hair? If that is what you call it, then yes, your... hair. So? So? So, cut it off, man! It's a health hazard. My hair? Whatever you call it, you have a serious case of the Moldovans. I think you mean Morgelans. Look, who's the doctor here?
00:01:20
Speaker
Don't make me drag out my degrees. You're not that kind of doctor, though. I can still recognize a case of the Montenegroans when I see one. More gallons. Look, stop trying to confuse me with fancy words. You have a Minnesotan problem and we need to fix it. Here, pour this liquid all over your body. What is it? A deplorable crane. Don't you mean depilatory? I don't think my political leanings have anything to do with this particular matter.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yet why is this suddenly an issue? I've been a hairy man since you first met me long hair in the bed, then longish hair and the bed. Yes, and it's becoming a problem. How so? I'd rather not talk about it. Is it my luscious locks? Is my manly beard turning you on?
00:02:04
Speaker
Yes, your gingery hair is becoming a distraction. Every time you talk, I look at your follicle growth and, well, I lose myself. And then I have no idea where the conversation has gone. I see. So, because you've lost control of your libido, I have to remove all my hair? Yes. Or you could cut out your eyes.
00:02:25
Speaker
No, because I'd still know you have that hair. No, the only option is you have to rid yourself of your follicle beauty and thus return our relationship to how it was. Then the joke's on you. This hair on my face is... a wig! It's like looking at an old Lex Luthor! So, happy now? No, because I have a supervillain fetish. A geriatric supervillain fetish. Whisper to me about green kryptonite.
Listener-Suggested Episode Introduction
00:02:59
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indented.
00:03:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison, and all the way over in Zhuhai, China, it's Dr. M. Denteth. Hello there. Do we have anything to go at the start of this episode or are we just diving? I suppose we could say that this episode was the topic for this episode was a suggestion from a friend of the show, Drew.
00:03:30
Speaker
It was indeed, I was going to mention that in the preamble to the topic itself, but yes, Drew, we are finally talking about the issue that is dearest to your heart, the fibrous growths on your back.
00:03:42
Speaker
This might be a good point to mention that if you become one of our patrons, then you get access to our Discord server, which has a channel for the suggesting of episodes. Which Drew is not a patron, so he's not actually able to suggest things through the back channel. Well, he gets on his back, which is suggesting this episode.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yes, either that or sort of just know us in person and hit us up at pubs and what have you. Well, precisely. Although that's become a lot more difficult to try and hit me up in a pub, my geographical isolation at this time.
00:04:18
Speaker
And speaking of which, same as last week, we may have some internet issues here. And as we found out last week, because we are recording this using the service called Zencaster, which cleverly records locally at each end,
00:04:34
Speaker
rather than just recording the entire stream. So what that means, though, is that you end up with a situation where as far as you, the listener, is concerned, both of us sound fine, and yet all of a sudden we'll stop and start going, I can't hear you. What? Oh, you gone? You there? What?
00:04:49
Speaker
I mean, it would be possible to edit those bits out, I suppose, but as far as I'm aware, that sort of technology doesn't exist to us. Oh, no, no, no. See, it turns out that it is, it is easier to edit these things out in audio than it is in video, given that you've got a kind of visual component, you need to kind of find ways to cut around. But in audio, I can remove things to my heart's content, I can make
00:05:15
Speaker
I make myself seem a lot stupider by just editing out certain key phrases. Excellent. Whereas I kept it all in largely in last week's video basically for comedy value. So if you're into that sort of thing, check out the YouTube channel. I'm sure it was very, very hilarious. Yes.
00:05:34
Speaker
Now, I guess we'd not beat around the bush anymore, I suppose. Should we just play a chime? And then we can actually tell people what Drew has told us to talk about. Which, of course, if you listen to the intro, you've probably got a fairly good idea of what we're going to talk about after this short sound effect.
Morgellons Disease Legitimacy Debate
00:05:57
Speaker
So, as you probably worked out from the sketch at the beginning, we're here today to talk about Morgellons disease.
00:06:04
Speaker
And Morgellons disease is an interesting thing because the thing about Morgellons is that there's argument over whether or not it's actually a disease. What do people say about Morgellons? Well, people who suffer from Morgellons disease claim that it's a mysterious skin condition, mysterious in the sense that no one's been able to completely explain the etymology of it at this point in time.
00:06:31
Speaker
where people develop slow healing sores and lesions where these lesions often contain strange microscopic fibres which are found inside the lesions and sufferers often report a feeling of things moving beneath their skin and sometimes cases of fatigue.
00:06:52
Speaker
That's what people who claim to suffer from Morgellons say it is. And it should be said that the sores are real, right? That these people do actually have things on their bodies. Yeah. But when it comes to the cause of it, medical opinion is divided. I wouldn't even say it's particularly divided. Well, I suppose here.
00:07:20
Speaker
claim that Morgellon's disease is a form of delusional parasitosis.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes, sorry, I should say the divide is not within the medical community. It's between the medical community and the Morgellons community, as it were. Yeah, so the medical consensus at the moment seems to be that it has a mental origin rather than being caused by, say, a virus or bacteria or anything like that.
00:07:55
Speaker
There's, it fits the bill in many cases of, as you say, delusional parasitosis, which is a mental disorder where people have this belief that they're infested with living, what's the quote, living or non-living pathogens such as parasites, insects or bugs, when that is not in fact the case. And there's also
00:08:17
Speaker
talk in some cases of a somatic symptom disorder which apparently is a disorder where people are hyper aware of normal bodily sensations which they interpret as a sort of medical illness which sounds a lot like when we if you recall when we've talked about targeted individuals in the past
00:08:37
Speaker
it's come up that we all have little cuts and scrapes on our body in various places just all the time that we don't even notice. We didn't remember getting them, we don't notice that they're there and then they heal and we never think of them again. But occasionally if you're sort of very aware and checking yourself over all the time you might notice these little cuts and scrapes that you don't remember getting and think it's something sinister and it sounds like
00:09:02
Speaker
the somatic symptom disorder is a similar sort of thing. We have little irritations and things that could, in other circumstances, cause an itch all over our body all the time, but our brain just filters them out because it knows they're not important. But some people
00:09:20
Speaker
can't or don't filter these messages out and so are aware of itching sensations all the time and of course there's there is that sort of psychological component to itching. I would place money on the fact that you people listening to this podcasting right now are starting to get a little itchy from just us talking about itchiness and are probably going to get itchier as the episode progresses. Indeed I like to think of this when we talk about paper cuts
00:09:44
Speaker
So people get paper cuts all the time and people often notice paper cuts well after the event at which point it goes from being something that you had not noticed and were coping with quite well to the most painful thing on your body by the time you actually are aware of it. So paper cuts are a great example of a case where you can be injured
00:10:10
Speaker
and not notice it, but once you are aware of the injury it kind of takes over your senses at that point. In the same respect, as you point out, we have cuts and scrapes on our body all the time because the process of just moving around the world means we are in the process of injuring ourselves on a moment by moment basis. But most of the time we spot these injuries as they're healing
00:10:37
Speaker
And sometimes you spot them in a way you end up going, I don't know how I generated that injury. But that doesn't mean that the injury itself is mysterious. It simply means that something occurred and you were distracted at the time that you injured yourself.
00:10:56
Speaker
The medical community, of course, is quite accepting of the fact that these people's suffering is real. The sores are real. They do exist. The sensations they're experiencing are real and debilitating, but it's simply the cause of these things is the real issue. The whole microscopic fibers thing is kind of key, I think, to Magellan's. That seems to be the main recurring
00:11:26
Speaker
a symptom of people wounds which when examined show these little fibers inside them and it's kind of I think as we get through this I think we'll see that's kind of where things get to be a lot more conspiratorial that they might otherwise be.
00:11:43
Speaker
Also, as I think we'll become more apparent as we go through this, there's not a lot of, I guess, consistency in a lot of what's said, especially because
00:11:56
Speaker
Most Morgellons sufferers tend to be sort of self-diagnosed and self-reporting. So it's the symptoms aren't always the same, which often means that the medical diagnosis isn't necessarily all the same. It's not that every single person who thinks they have Morgellons actually has delusional parasitosis. There could be a range of other a whole variety of conditions that could be causing some of these people's problems. And then on top of that, there are other issues around
00:12:25
Speaker
that could be mental as well. So it all gets a little bit tangled. But the only thing we know for certain is that Joni Mitchell says she has it. Yes, which I was not aware of. No, neither was I, but apparently she said
00:12:39
Speaker
suggested she'd like to give up music altogether and devote her life to being an advocate for raising awareness around Morgellons.
Advocacy and Historical Medical Dismissals
00:12:50
Speaker
Which I think is a really interesting point here because there is a lot of advocacy in the Morgellons community, which is understandable. If you have what you take to be a persistent disease, which is shared by a range of people found all around the world,
00:13:08
Speaker
that mainstream doctors have said, well, we actually don't think it's a real disease at all. You can see why, if you think you are suffering from said disease, that you want to engage in an advocacy campaign to convince the population the disease is real in the hope you can then persuade doctors to take you seriously when you talk about that disease, when you go for a consult.
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I think we've all heard cases of the sort of arrogant medical community saying, oh, it's all in your head.
00:13:47
Speaker
to someone who then discovers they're actually suffering from something a bit more rare and esoteric that these that their GPs just weren't aware of and so on. And indeed, actually, medical history is kind of replete with the sexism of doctors going on, you know, you're a woman who doesn't know you're suffering from from wandering womb. That's not a real condition case of age. I think you'll find that
00:14:10
Speaker
actually there are there are some conditions which which people with uteruses actually do have and maybe maybe male doctors over time were just ignoring those because they weren't taking women seriously and so there is a worry here when we start talking about things like Morgellons disease and the like that there is a long history in medical practice of doctors simply ignoring patients and going
00:14:38
Speaker
I know better. I'm not even going to investigate your claim. I'm just going to dismiss you because you belong to Group X. Which is probably a good segue into the history of Morgellons itself. So it's a relatively new approach.
00:14:54
Speaker
to the distant past of 2001. Yeah, so Morgellons begins with a single person, a woman named Mary Leitau, possibly Leitau, I'm not sure, that's one I haven't heard spoken out loud.
00:15:10
Speaker
who was a woman from Pittsburgh in the States. And in around 2001, her young son began exhibiting these sorts of symptoms we talked about. He was just a little boy, but he was complaining about sort of itchiness and feeling like there are bugs on him and started developing these sores.
00:15:29
Speaker
Now, she had some, she was a biologist or something, I think, she did have some sort of expertise. And to begin with, I think it came when she was, she'd be sort of cleaning the areas where you had soils or rubbing him and reckon she saw these little weird little things flaking off from the wounds.
00:15:51
Speaker
and put them under just a little microscope and saw to her surprise there were these strange little fibers inside that had come out of the wounds and she went to her doctors to talk about this.
00:16:07
Speaker
And numerous doctors examined the boy and basically weren't able to come up with anything that would account for any sort of medical condition that would account for what was going on, and especially not for the presence of weird fibers in people's wounds, which was kind of unheard of.
00:16:24
Speaker
And the more doctors she took it to, the more people started to come up with the idea that this disease had more of a mental cause than a physical one and that it was possibly
00:16:39
Speaker
this sort of delusional parasitosis thing on the sun's part that potentially the wounds themselves were caused by obsessive scratching due to the sensation of this itching under the skin. Some people suggested a munchausen's by proxy syndrome on the part of Mrs Laitau, suggesting that maybe she was actually causing these symptoms in the boy.
00:17:04
Speaker
And so obviously, for reasons we've just mentioned, she did not take very kindly to being told that she didn't know what she was talking about and possibly was making her own son sick and so went off on her own to sort of research things.
00:17:21
Speaker
She ended up, the name Morgellons itself, she for some reason was reading a 17th century medical treatise called A Letter to a Friend, which was written by a man called Sir Thomas Brown in 1656. Don't you want to spend our evenings reading 17th century treatises on medicine? I know I do.
00:17:38
Speaker
Well, I mean, obviously, she was just looking around for anything that might be about skin conditions or something. But this, so this fellow called Sir Thomas Brown wrote this letter in 1656. It was apparently published posthumously in 1690.
00:17:55
Speaker
And he's talking about various conditions that he's encountered to this friend of his, and at one point he describes a skin condition called the Morgellons, so it doesn't actually say where that name, where he got the name from, but something called the Morgellons where children, to quote Sir Brown, critically break out with harsh hairs on their backs, which takes off the unquiet symptoms of the disease and delivers them from coughs and convulsions. So
00:18:24
Speaker
I don't think, nobody's ever suggested that this thing, children growing harsh hairs on their backs, actually is the phenomenon that people are calling Morgellons these days. It's just sort of a similar sounding kind of thing and the name kind of stuck. So she gave it a name. She started an advocacy group in 2002, which eventually turned into the Morgellons Research Foundation, which she founded as a nonprofit in 2004.
00:18:51
Speaker
And then the internet, basically. The internet took it from there. And as we've seen with other phenomena, people who claim to be suffering from the same sorts of things got in touch. And before you know it, you had a community of people saying, yes, I have this condition. Nobody takes me seriously either. We need to do something about it. Which, of course, does get us into the awkwardness of self-diagnosis on the internet.
00:19:20
Speaker
because I'm sure listeners to this podcast are very aware of what happens when you put your symptoms into a search engine. Largely you'll find that you've got cancer.
00:19:33
Speaker
Because, you know, it turns out that cancer, the great killer, has a range of symptoms and there's a lot of different cancers. So there's basically a symptom for every kind of cancer out there. So if you do a search for your symptoms online, you are going to spend the next hour or so going, oh, God, I need to be I need invasive tests. I think I'm going to die of cancer X or Y.
00:19:57
Speaker
And then you go see a doctor and the doctor goes, don't be stupid. Why are you diagnosing yourself on the internet? So the internet is actually really, really bad for medical diagnosis. But it is very good for drawing people together.
00:20:12
Speaker
I think they have a particular type of complaint. Yes. Now, I'm not quite sure what's going on with the Morgellons Research Foundation now. I had read that it closed down in 2012 and had a notice on their site to directing future inquiries to Oklahoma State University, which we'll talk about in a minute.
00:20:33
Speaker
When I went and looked to their site, Morgellons.org, it was still up. It had material dated after 2012. It had sort of a, here's the board of the foundation with people including Mrs. Laytow. And it also had sort of articles which were
00:20:55
Speaker
took things a little bit further than just talking about medical stuff. And we'll get onto that later as well. But first, maybe we should talk about the fact that by 2006, the Morgellons Research Foundation had advocated well enough that a lot of people were paying attention, including people quite high up in the US government.
CDC Investigation and Inconclusive Findings
00:21:16
Speaker
And enough people had paid enough attention that the CDC in America, that was that Center for Disease Control. That's correct. Put together a task force and started an investigation into Magallans beginning in 2006, which their study ran for six years, and they released their findings in 2012. And what did they find?
00:21:39
Speaker
Well, first of all, I want to point out 2012 was a mighty year that was the year of the May and Doomsday prophecy. It was, yes. Which took time to overshadow almost every other conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds back in 2012. So the CDC released their report in 2012, and they released a peer-reviewed piece. They found no common cause of disease among the sufferers they'd been studying for four to five years.
00:22:09
Speaker
In fact, they found no evidence of a contagion, and studies of the fibres taken from the sores of suspected Morgellons disease sufferers show that they were largely composed of cotton or nylon consistent with the fibres found in clothing and carpeting, i.e.
00:22:29
Speaker
Our bodies are covered in natural and synthetic fibers all the time from living in our industrialized lives and some of those fibers get into our skin. So according to the report, 23 fiber or other material specimens are obtained from diverse intact skin sites in 12 case patients.
00:22:54
Speaker
The materials were largely composed of protein, likely superficial skin or cellulose, consistent with cotton fibers, some with evidence of dyes. Three samples contained other materials alone or in combination, including polyamide, probably nylon, cellulose nitrate containing bismuth, consistent with nail polish, and polyethylene possible contaminant from specimen container lit.
00:23:21
Speaker
So basically what they discovered was the fibers inside the skin or around the soils were contaminants associated with living industrialized lives. Yes, so nothing actually mysterious about them.
00:23:38
Speaker
Now, then we come to Oklahoma State University. We should say something about the typical sufferer. We could say that indeed, yes. So they said, case patients had a median age of 52 years, their range was 17 to 93, were primarily female, 77% female and 77% Caucasian. So your typical Morgellan sufferer is a middle-aged white woman.
00:24:06
Speaker
much like Mrs Laitau herself, although she wasn't actually the sufferer, she was the mother of a sufferer. She was, to quote, a suffering mother. She was. But yes, Oklahoma State University, the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences has been or possibly was being studied. Yeah, we'll get into that in just a minute.
00:24:35
Speaker
in a project led by Randy Wymore, Associate Professor of Pharmacology. So, yeah, there is a page for the project. It appears to be current. It lists some interesting facts, such as the fact that most cases in the United States are from specific geographic regions of California, Texas, and Florida, although all 50 states have had reported cases. Oklahoma has reported numerous probable cases.
00:25:00
Speaker
One of the stated purposes behind the research at Oklahoma State University is for major government organizations to pay attention and start funding their research.
00:25:12
Speaker
Now, that worked, I guess, to begin with, because the CDC did take an interest and delivered their findings. But has anything come out of that since the CDC offered their verdict? No. So as far as I can tell, Weimaur hasn't published anything that I can see listed at his Oklahoma State University web page since around about 2008.
00:25:39
Speaker
And there appears to be no information about the research project that post states around about 2009. So what's interesting about this, as we noted before, is that the Morgellons Research Foundation and around about 2006, when the CDC study started, pointed people towards the Oklahoma State University research into Morgellons disease.
00:26:05
Speaker
Then we find that post the CDC producing their results, suddenly the Morgellons Research Foundation starts posting once again on their website and there appears to be no information coming out of Oklahoma State University within about two years of the CDC study being released. So it does seem as if the OSU study has kind of come to a close
00:26:34
Speaker
But the website is still active and according to the site they're still looking for people to join the research project but that might be a case of keeping a website alive even though no one's actually doing any work on it at this time.
00:26:51
Speaker
So that's what the two sides, if you want to call it that, say, the Morgan's advocates and the wider medical community. And when it comes to sorting out exactly what's plausible and what's credible and what's warranted and so on, it gets very difficult because there's just so much inconsistency. As we said, most of these cases are self-diagnosed, self-reported, people coming together
00:27:20
Speaker
in communities on the internet, which means you get a wide variety of exactly what symptoms people are suffering from, the nature of the suffering, which can itself then have a problem where possibly a medical
00:27:39
Speaker
explanation for one set of symptoms is proposed, but then people say, well, that's those symptoms, but I have these other ones. So that's not me, but because you just have this wide group of different people with potentially different symptoms amongst the Morgellons community,
00:27:57
Speaker
people who think organs is a genuine disease, the suggestions for what might be causing it are fairly wide and varied. Some people think it might be a bacteria, for instance. Some people like to talk about something we've mentioned before, the old stomach ulcers thing, where people then discovered it was the H. pylori bacteria that is the actual cause of stomach ulcers. Some people say that it's probably...
00:28:25
Speaker
Um, some people say that with them, so maybe, maybe it's going to be a situation like that. Maybe there's this bacteria we haven't discovered yet, which is actually the cause. Um, and you're writing it off as a mental cause because that we just don't have the information. Some people think it might be a fungal infection and that the fibers are somehow sort of fungal related. So you can talk relating it to Lyme disease or chronic Lyme disease, which apparently is another one of these disputed ones. Lyme disease obviously is a very real disease. You can get from, was it like ticks and fleas or something.
00:28:55
Speaker
Who talked about how it was dangerous to go hiking in the woods because there were ticks with Lyme disease in the woods and they were just latch on through your leg. Yeah.
00:29:07
Speaker
But then the idea of chronic Lyme disease is supposedly after the sort of long lasting symptoms that occur well after the person's got over the initial Lyme disease, which the medical community basically says that's not really a thing. There's nothing to show that the actual Lyme disease is causing these things in the longer term. So it's sort of that those two have become related. And then furthermore,
00:29:32
Speaker
some of the treatments that people in the Morgellons community suggest for it. Again, you get variety. Some people claim that sort of antibiotics have sorted things out on the assumption that there's some sort of bacterial cause, but then other people have said, no, I've tried that and it hasn't worked at all. The nature of the mysterious fibers is something that just from reading through things for this episode seems to vary quite a bit.
00:30:01
Speaker
Mrs. Laytail, when she first, apparently, you know, first actually saw with her naked eye these things supposedly flaking off from the wounds from her son and then examined them with a microscope they had at home, which is somewhat referred to as a toy microscope. I assume, I mean, a microscope you can just buy in a regular store rather than a piece of scientific quality sort of equipment.
00:30:28
Speaker
So she was able to see the fibers with a microscope like that, but then other people talk about, you know, it's more gallons, these things, they have to be visible under 50 times magnification, or sometimes people said under 100 times magnification.
00:30:43
Speaker
And then there's this talk of nanotechnology as well, which we'll get into a little bit. So there's not, again, a huge amount of consistency in these fibers, which are sort of central to the whole Mulgalens thing. Some people claim to have sort of performed all sorts of tests on them. I read one person reckoned that take one of these fibers and heat it up to 600 degrees and it had no effect on the fiber whatsoever. I don't really know what to make of that.
00:31:09
Speaker
And then also this sort of consistency leads to inconsistency in the medical opinions around it as well, because if you have a whole bunch of different sorts of symptoms in this cluster, then you'll get medical opinion, differing medical opinions that are focusing on different sorts.
00:31:27
Speaker
of the symptoms and there are potentially more than one possible cause for these things. So some people, you know, will say the idea that delusional paracytosis, 100% mental, the physical sores that you're seeing are simply a result of people scratching constantly and there they're actually creating the sores without possibly realizing to begin with. And then other people
00:31:52
Speaker
talk about the idea you know there could be these are genuine skin conditions caused by one thing but the whole insects crawling under the skin thing and the obsession with these supposed fibers that might be a mental aspect to it.
Skepticism and Genuine Symptoms Debate
00:32:06
Speaker
I read an interesting The Guardian did a story on it back in 2011
00:32:11
Speaker
And as part of it, at one point, actually, one thing that was interesting was the guy writing the article went to a conference, a sort of a Morgellons conference, and put his own hand under a microscope and saw mysterious little fibers on his hand, which did remind me of when we were talking about the targeted individuals putting volt meters on themselves to say, look, there's a current, there's an electrical charge. And then the reporter looking at them did the same thing and said, yeah, I get the same thing for me. And they're like, oh, maybe that means you've got it too.
00:32:42
Speaker
In the article, I talked to Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander, who's an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who's a neurologist who specializes in itching.
00:32:51
Speaker
which is an interesting subject of its own apparently itching has its own sort of its own different nerves separate from like pain nerves and its own neural pathways and they act quite differently and it's suspected that the reason why we itch in the first place is sort of an evolved response to alert us to things like insects crawling on our body.
00:33:15
Speaker
because people often live in places like you say where there can be poisonous ticks and in mosquitoes that can give you malaria and what have you so that being alerted to the presence of those things could actually be quite quite beneficial and it's interesting she said in this article
00:33:33
Speaker
In my experience, Morgellons patients are doing the best they can to make sense of symptoms that are real. They're suffering from a chronic itch disorder that's undiagnosed. They've been maltreated by the medical establishment, and you're welcome to quote me on that. So her opinion was that, yes, there is a medical disorder there. It's an itching disorder. It's not caused by parasites or bacteria or what have you, perhaps.
00:33:56
Speaker
And she was, like we've seen, not a fan of the medical establishments habit of saying, well, I can't understand this, so it's all in your mind sort of thing and following people off. And yet in that particular article, the reporter went back to one of the Magellan sufferers that he had talked to and said, look, here's this medical person who says, yes, you could well be suffering from an actual itching disorder.
00:34:24
Speaker
And the guy's response to that was, no, that can't be true because I have, if you're saying it's an itching disorder and I'm causing the sores by scratching, well, I have ones on my back that I can't reach to scratch. So that can't be it. And so it ends up not going anywhere with that particular person. So yeah, it's all, it just gets a little bit murky and really hard to,
00:34:47
Speaker
say anything definite about. But maybe what we can be a bit more definite about, because this is a conspiracy theory podcast and we haven't really talked about conspiracy theories yet, is actually get into the conspiracy angles.
Conspiracy Theories Surrounding Morgellons
00:34:59
Speaker
So what are the conspiracies around Morgellons?
00:35:02
Speaker
Alright, so most of the websites devoted to Morgellons disease basically argue thusly. Mainstream doctors think that Morgellons disease is not real, but here are people who claim to have it, and thus they ask, who are you going to believe? The sufferers? Or the doctors who deny that the sufferers exist?
00:35:21
Speaker
And so basically there's a claim here that mainstream doctors are either completely ignorant, which is a non-conspiratorial angle here, or mainstream doctors are aware Morgellon's disease is a real thing and they're engaged in some kind of cover-up or collusion.
00:35:42
Speaker
to deny the existence of the disease, which then makes it a conspiracy amongst mainstream medical professionals, maybe because they're not willing to admit that alternative modalities, aka alternative medicine, might be the only solution to this.
00:36:01
Speaker
or mainstream doctors are ignorant or involved in a conspiracy because Morgana's disease is a bio weapon and thus there is a state sanctioned conspiracy to deny the existence of the disease
00:36:17
Speaker
in order to avoid talking about how the disease was generated. So yes, you kind of get two conspiracies here. Either the medical establishment is covering something up because they don't want to admit that alternative ways of engaging in medical practice would resolve the disease, or medical professionals are covering something up because it's a bio weapon and no one wants to admit the bio weapon exists.
00:36:45
Speaker
And as we've seen, conspiracies tend to latch on to other conspiracies, so... Sometimes. I mean, not always.
00:36:56
Speaker
Or at least there's a certain kind of conspiracy theorist who's quite happy to draw in any other conspiracies that they see to fit their own. I think this very much is a feature of certain conspiracy theorists and not a feature of conspiracy theories. There are some people out there
00:37:17
Speaker
who are happy to go with free form association. And that's going to be true in every domain. So it is going to be true when it comes to some conspiracy theorists as well.
00:37:29
Speaker
So returning to Morgellons.org, the website that appears to be from the Morgellons Research Foundation, these days the first most recent blog post on that website is entitled, in all capital letters, chemtrails and Morgellons, it's worse than you thought. So relating the instances of Morgellons disease to chemtrails and suggesting that's some sort of a cause.
00:37:55
Speaker
And then also on the front page, revelations from a man who helped design Morgellons disease. And it has a couple of videos with interviews with a person who claims that they had spoken to someone. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait. So I think this is a terribly misleading headline because I watched parts of the video. So you would assume with the headline, revelations from a man who helped design Morgellons disease, which links to two videos
00:38:22
Speaker
of a man and a woman engaging in a conversation, that the man in question would be the man who helped design Morgellons disease. But no, it's a discussion between two people, one person who is a naturopath, the other of whom suffers from Morgellons disease, talking about a third person who was anonymous, who got in contact with one of them,
00:38:48
Speaker
and claimed to be the person who helped design Morgellons disease. So at no point do we either hear from the supposed designer of Morgellons disease, let alone do we find out any details about them. We have to take it on trust that the person that they're talking about was being honest and sincere. It's a terribly misleading headline that makes you think you're about to find out something really important,
00:39:15
Speaker
when actually it turns out we're entirely reliant on trusting the people in the video to A, be not credulous fools, and B, the kind of people who know that they're talking to the right kind of person. Yes. And then from there, Morgellons has also been incorporated into other well-known conspiracy theories. Sometimes people talk about genetically modified organisms as being the cause of Morgellons.
00:39:44
Speaker
Some people have talked claimed that Morgellons was developed as a bioweapon as part of MK Delta and MK Ultra.
00:39:54
Speaker
Now MK Delta was another name for Ultra. MK Naomi was a successor to Ultra, which ran from the 50s to the 70s, apparently developing bioweapons, but we don't know a lot about it. A lot of MK Ultras and its successor stuff was just burned, wasn't it? They just
00:40:16
Speaker
got rid of. It was. In 1973, a lot of the records around the NK programs was destroyed. And do you know who dissolved NK Ultra? Was it was it Tricky Dick himself, Richard Nixon? It was.
00:40:33
Speaker
Once again, this podcast is in the weird position of praising Richard Nixon. We praise Richard Nixon when it came to the gold standard many years ago when I was in Romania. Now I'm in China, we're going to praise Richard Nixon for going MK Ultra is a terrible thing and it must be shut down. This is the voice of Richard Nixon. It's like he's in the room with us now.
00:40:56
Speaker
That's true, dear. So Tricky Dickey dissolved... It makes it sound as if he had a vat of acid he was putting in MKUltra. Nixon basically... Dissolved in the over years. Yeah. That MKUltra be dissolved in 1969. But it turns out that a year after MKUltra was meant to be dissolved, the CIA were able to get some of the bioweapons that were being worked upon in MKNaomi
00:41:26
Speaker
where they were moved to Fort Detrick, which notably is where people claim that Magillan's disease was engineered. Fort Detrick is 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. So apparently in the 50s it was used as a place for researching and testing germ warfare.
00:41:48
Speaker
And it is a place for researching biological work in the US Army. So if you want to do biological research and you're in the US Army, Fort Detrick is where you go. So yes, we know that from the 50s to the 70s, the CIA did their MK Ultra and MK Naomi work there. But again, we don't know much because the records all went away.
00:42:18
Speaker
Well, apparently it was a biological warfare station during World War II. Most? Yes, yeah. Well, yes, enough that we know about the existence, but yes, I think a lot of the details are lost to history and fire. But yeah, people, it was a biological warfare station during World War II, but then World War II was when nuclear weapons came along, and biological warfare was yesterday's news once nuclear weapons came up, and people kind of lost interest at that point, and then
00:42:47
Speaker
They became interested in, again, a little bit due to the Cold War, when we were no longer looking at actually nuking one another out of existence, but still wanted to be able to do stuff like a bit of the old anthrax. What was the one we talked about? I've forgotten the name now. The Russian anthrax factory that had the big leak.
00:43:14
Speaker
City's now called Yekaterinburg. I can't remember the old name of it. I cannot recall the name. There's something incident. Yeah.
00:43:23
Speaker
We'll go back and find it another time. Or we won't. Yeah, so what's all this about the CIA and brainwashing and stuff? Yeah, it's insinuated itself into conspiracy theories as far back as the 50s or World War II, but it's still alive and kicking today. There was a TikTok video from the start of this year.
00:43:46
Speaker
got a little bit of news when you had a woman, obviously, COVID conspiracies, the next big one that more gallons can get incorporated into. So there was a TikTok video of a woman who'd taken the cotton swabs that people were using for COVID testing and sort of pulled one apart and sort of had, you know, here's a cotton bud from that I just sort of, you know, buy it at a supermarket.
00:44:12
Speaker
And here's one of the ones that they use. And look at the weird different one. There's these little silvery particles in it and referred to these fibers that she was pulling out of the cotton swabs as more gallons or possibly nanoparticles or something and sort of held these thin fibers up to the camera and said, look, they're moving like they're alive or possibly being blown by some sort of wind or even a slight temperature differential. But we didn't get into that.
00:44:39
Speaker
And people pointed out, well, actually, yes, the swabs they use for COVID testing aren't quite the same as the ones you buy in a supermarket. Supermarket cotton buds tend to be made from cotton, whereas synthetic fibers are better for swabbing for disease, and that's the sort of thing that they use.
00:44:55
Speaker
It certainly hasn't gone away. At the end of the day, I sort of come to the same conclusion as we did when we talked about targeted individuals, that a whole heap of this phenomena all just seems to be grounded in the fact that there is this long-lasting social stigma around mental
Mental Illness Stigma and Morgellons Perception
00:45:13
Speaker
illness. Because every single time you read about Mughal and sufferers being sort of confronted with alternative medical
00:45:22
Speaker
or psychiatric, especially explanations for it. And they all say the exact same thing. I'm not crazy. And that's exactly what the what's what your target individual said every time. And it's just the idea that there is something horribly, horribly wrong with you and horribly bad about you to be suffering from some sort of mental condition that leads people to say, but I'm a good person, so therefore I can't have a mental illness. And that's just
00:45:51
Speaker
that's just wrong, and just plain damaging. And indeed, actually, this seems epic, given that today is the day in Olympic history where Simone Biles has basically went, I'm going to pull out of the competition.
00:46:07
Speaker
because I do not feel that I'm mentally stable enough to be able to compete at this level due to a whole bunch of things going on in the background. And there's a whole bunch of people going, oh, if only she would harden up. I mean, she hardens up, she could win that gold. And people are going, actually having a frank discussion about your mental state impacting a high performance sport is actually a good and healthy thing. It's a recognition of actually
00:46:34
Speaker
I realise there's a problem here and the way to fix it is to work on my mental health and actually acknowledge that actually that's that's a good thing to do rather than go oh it's such a such a terrible thing because no actually that is a healthy response to admit that actually sometimes things do go awry mentally
Mental Health in Sports
00:46:56
Speaker
and actually dealing with that and then going actually what is going on there is the healthy response rather than go no no I'm I'm I'm I must be perfectly fine it's other people who have the problem yes I mean especially with gymnastics which is the
00:47:12
Speaker
the insanely precise and difficult movements that you need to do, which if you get them wrong, involve you landing on your head at high speed and possibly, you know, dying or becoming permanently paralyzed. There is no room for error, so yeah.
00:47:31
Speaker
I think she was talking about the fact that if she starts seeking, guessing herself in the middle of a routine, she's going to seriously injure herself. She needs to be able to trust the process completely in anything which undermines the kind of the mind and the body. Yeah, it has to become muscle one. You have to just do it automatically.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, I also actually did this discussion also brought up the idea in the competitive shooting. There can be I can't remember what they called it but when you're, you know, sort of the competitive shooting where you're you need to be some millimeter precise and you're aiming.
00:48:14
Speaker
that's sort of a very real danger as well of you start second guessing your aiming and it just throws absolutely everything off to the point that it's sort of like Macbeth, the Scottish play. You don't even talk about the possibility of getting into this mental state because that can put you in that mental state. When things become that precise, there's really just no room for error. But anyway,
00:48:36
Speaker
I mean, I'm not a big fan of watching sport, but I did once when I was in Norway, spend an afternoon watching the biathlon, which to my mind is the most intriguing of the Winter Olympics sport. Skiing and shooting, that's quite a combo. It appears to be A, the sport that Bond villain plays, and also B,
00:48:57
Speaker
appears to be a sport based around assassination. There's a ski to a vantage point, pull out your sniper's rifle, take four shots and then ski away. And the thing that to be able to successfully win the biathlon you have to do this kind of hike in the snow and then not miss a shot. If you miss a shot you have to do the entire loop again and psychologically that has to be incredibly damaging to go
00:49:26
Speaker
Right, so I've got four of the five shots, four of the five shots. If I miss this shot, I have to start again from scratch.
00:49:36
Speaker
And yet at the same time, as someone pointed out to me, the thing that you have to do this hike around the system then also gives you breathing time to then go, all right, so didn't get all five shots in a row last time. But now I've got 15 minutes where I can kind of get my breathing back to normal, get myself back into a better mental state, and then I can try again.
00:49:59
Speaker
And so it's kind of a weird situation of there's a high amount of stress to get those shots, but there's also a system built in to allow you to get your breathing back and your stress levels down again before you attempt it for the second or third time.
00:50:14
Speaker
But anyway, the fact that we're now on to Olympic Games and Bond villains probably signifies the fact that we're done talking about Mulgalens and maybe we should wrap this episode up and then go on to record a bonus episode for our patrons who once again do get to suggest topics.
00:50:29
Speaker
for episodes of this, for main episodes of this podcast. How does one become a patron? Well, one goes to patreon.com, looks up the podcast's guide to the conspiracy, and then gives us at least a dollar US a month, at which point you get access to bonus episodes, the occasional bit of behind the scenes material, and a Discord server, which is sadly the
00:50:55
Speaker
neglected. I'm also having issues actually getting on to the Discord server in China but I'm sure I'll be able to sort that out at some point. So yes, a dollar a month and you get bonus episodes such as the one we're going to be recording where we go back to one of our favourite US conservative Christian organisations, Hobby Lobby, to find out what they've stolen recently.
00:51:21
Speaker
We also get to talk about research into Alzheimer's and we've got two follow-ups which relate to our discussion of Uncle Sam's Snuff Factory and that good old Havana sound, Havana Syndrome. So, if you want to hear about those and you're a patron, then just keep on, keep watching the skies. If you'd like to hear about those and you're not a patron, then Johnny will become one.
00:51:48
Speaker
or not. I'm not your mum. But regardless of patron or not, thank you for listening. But now I think it is time to call this episode to a close, which we shall do in the traditional way by me saying goodbye. And me saying that the audio visual glitches in this episode rated a three out of 10. We apologize for the lack of service.
00:52:11
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M. R. X. Denteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December was a night.