By Stacy Lee Kong

The first time I heard about Lyme disease, I was a kid. The protagonist of the YA novel I was reading contracted it during a vacation on Fire Island, a summer resort destination off the coast of Long Island. That was in the 90s and at the time, it wasn’t exactly the stuff of celebrity gossip.

But in the past ten years, lots of celebrities have started talking about how they’d been diagnosed with Lyme and the toll it had taken on their physical and mental health.  

Justin Bieber is the latest. On January 8, he posted a photo of a TMZ headline on his Instagram page along with a caption that said, in part, “While a lot of people kept saying justin [sic] Bieber looks like shit, on meth etc. they failed to realize I've been recently diagnosed with Lyme disease, not only that but had a serious case of chronic mono which affected my, skin, brain function, energy, and overall health.” But he’s far from the only one: fellow Canadians Avril Lavigne and Shania Twain both say they’ve been diagnosed, and so have Bella Hadid, her brother Anwar and her mom Yolanda. Kelly Osborne says she was bitten by a tick at her dad’s 56th birthday, leading to years of increasingly serious symptoms, and Aly Hilfiger wrote a book about her experience with Lyme disease, Bite Me: How Lyme Disease Stole My Childhood, Made Me Crazy, and Almost Killed Me. (She was bitten by a tick and diagnosed at the age of seven.)  

Weirdly, it seems like Lyme disease is kind of… a trend? Which makes it really easy for the general public (a.k.a., me) to be skeptical of the celebs who say they have it.

To be clear, Lyme disease is definitely a real illness. It’s one of the most common tick-borne diseases in the U.S., and can cause fever, rash, joint pain, fatigue and neurological problems. In Canada, the number of Lyme disease cases increased in every single province between 2009 and 2017, likely due, at least in part, to climate change. (According to a Public Health Agency of Canada report, “increased temperature increases the survival and activity period of ticks, increases the range of both reservoir and tick hosts… and increases the duration of the season when people may be exposed to ticks.” So that’s awesome.)

But many celebs talk about having chronic Lyme disease, and that’s a bit more controversial.

For most people who are diagnosed with Lyme disease, a course of antibiotics is all the treatment they need. But for some people, symptoms persist for months or years, and they can be frustratingly vague: fatigue, brain fog, numbness, tingling, palpitations, dizziness, aches and pain, according to a 2018 article about the illness posted on Harvard Medical School’s blog. They’re often difficult to treat, and don’t necessarily need to be linked to a tick bite. People experiencing these symptoms say they have chronic Lyme disease, which the Centers for Disease Control and most legit doctors prefer to call post-treatment Lyme disease—and which some people don’t think exists at all. (Yolanda Hadid’s Lyme disease, and her costars’ skepticism about it, was a major plotline on season six of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.)

Earlier this summer, The Cut published a long feature about how Lyme has become a lifestyle and an identity as much as it is a diagnosis, and the seemingly unscrupulous healthcare providers who have sprung up to serve this community. It was all really fascinating, but what struck me the most were the parallels between Lyme sufferers and Goop fans. Both groups are looking for validation that they’re not getting from mainstream healthcare providers, which is fair. And neither group is really getting the help they need, which is really not. (This especially applies to to the Lyme group, many of whom seek out the New York-based Dr. Bernard Raxlen, who practices out of a tiny office in Times Square and is not board certified in anything.) So yeah, I empathize with these celebs, and the “regular” people who say they have chronic Lyme disease—they’re clearly experiencing something.

But… I’m still skeptical of chronic Lyme disease diagnoses. I mean, could the Biebs really be sick? Sure. But could he also be the latest in a list of wealthy, privileged, white celebrities who are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous doctors? Also yes.