Twenty five years after identifying Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial infection characterized by a widely varying set of symptoms, Dr. Allen Steere of the New England Medical Center is regularly being stalked and has received numerous death threats from people who say they suffer from a chronic form of the disease that he and most medical authorities do not believe exists. A coalition of patient advocacy groups and anti-establishment physicians (communicating mainly via the Internet) insists that the disease is real and that it represents an especially virulent form of the previously identified bacterial strain, causing joint pain, chronic fatigue, suicidal depression, paralysis, and even death.

Steere has criticized some practititioners' willingness to prescribe unnecessary long-term intravenous antibiotics, which leads to liver problems, severe infections, immune suppression, and the emergence of resistant bacterial strains. Steere has also taken insurance companies to task for recognizing the bogus disease rather than pay for more expensive psychiatric treatment of psychosomatic disorders.

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