1. The City Politics Arts Sports The Mail Comics Blog: City Desk
Comments Print E-mail Share:
Under Our Skin
At 1 : 1 5 p . m . a t A F I S i l v e r .
Al s o a t 4 p . m . S a tu r d a y ,
Jun e 21 , at Di scove ry HD
The ate r ( pass hol de rs on l y)
a n d a t 8 p . m . Mo n d a y , J u n e
23, at AFI S il ver .
P OS TED : J UN E 1 1, 200 8
You might want to cancel that camping trip
after watching Under Our Skin, Andy
Abrahams Wilson’s candid and frightening
look at Lyme disease. Though it’s the most
common (and increasingly widespread)
vector-borne illness in the United States, it doesn’t garner Video: Under Our Skin
the hysterical press that West Nile Virus does, and there’s
controversy in the medical community over whether the
multi-symptom, often crippling disease is even a chronic
ailment. That leads to debates about treatment, which
means a lot of sick people get denied insurance coverage
and, more alarmingly, doctors who believe in aggressive,
long-term solutions lose their licenses. The film profiles six
sufferers, including Mandy, a pretty young woman prone to
fits of involuntary movement and can’t-stand-up
exhaustion; Elise, a wannabe mom who’s miscarried
because of the tick-spread infection; and Dana, a mid-30s
Full Coverage: The City Paper 's complete guide
event producer for U2 whose youthful looks and love of her to Silverdocs 2008
job helps hide the fact that she’s in constant pain, though
Send a Letter to the Editor
she says it can be frustrating that “everyone thinks I’m
normal.” One of the movie’s heroes is pathologist Alan
MacDonald, whose research is helping the case that the disease is truly chronic and not, as many believe,
psychosomatic. But you can see it for yourself, most startlingly in Mandy, whose years-long antibiotic
treatment reverses her from a near-vegetable back to the functional, articulate person she was before a mere
bug bite torpedoed her life. —TO
J UN . 13 - 19, 200 8 (V OL . 28 , #2 4)