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Issue: 2008/06/13
Issue Volume: 28

Under Our Skin At 1:15 p.m. at AFI Silver. Also at 4 p.m. Saturday, June 21, at Discovery HD Theater (passholders only) and at 8 p.m. Monday, June 23, at AFI Silver.

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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 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 event producer for U2 whose youthful looks and love of her job helps hide the fact that she’s in constant pain, though 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

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Issue: 2008/06/13
Issue Volume: 28
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