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Under Our Skin At 1: 15 p.m. a t AF I S i lve r. Al so a t 4 p.m. Sa tu rday ,

June 21 , at D i scove ry HD Theate r ( pass ho lde rs on l y) and at 8 p.m. Monday , J une 23, at AFI S i l ver .

POSTED : JUNE 11, 2008

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

JUN . 13 - 19, 2008 (VOL . 28, #24)

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Subjects

Andy Abrahams Wilson, Alan MacDonald, U2, United States

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