Madison Area Lyme Support Group

Editor’s note: Our writer Mary Beth Pfeiffer, an award-winning investigative reporter, is a rare mainstream journalist who has written about flawed policies on covid treatment. Before covid, she wrote articles and a book, Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change, that told of heroes like Dr. Charles Ray Jones. After a half-century of giving Lyme disease-infected children their lives back, Dr. Jones died in May at ninety-three. “Mainstream medicine never accepted Jones’ way of treating tick-borne illnesses,” Mary Beth says. “It should.” This is the story of one of many children Dr. Jones saved. —MC

Dr. Charles Ray Jones was eighty-seven years old and in his waning days of doctoring when Troy Murphy became his patient in late 2016. Early that year, the boy, age ten, had turned in mere weeks from exuberant, active, and whip-smart in school to unable to eat or walk and consumed by pain. Within months he was living in a hospital bed in the family living room. He was fed through a tube.

For his first appointment, this withered young boy was carried into Jones’ office, screaming and fearful of another doctor. In a three-hour examination he was reassured, and he came to trust. “You can be the same Troy you were before all this happened,” Jones, a giant of a man in a sweatsuit, told him. “You are fixable.”

And so Troy was. Two years later, he returned to school in a wheelchair, first part-time, then, months later, full-time. The following year, he started to walk the halls on his own. Today, six years later, Troy is a high school junior who hopes to try out for varsity soccer. He smiles broadly in family photos. He hikes and banters with his four brothers like he used to. He is happy and whole.

Dr. Jones died on May 15, 2022, at the age of ninety-three, from cardiopulmonary edema. Troy may have been one of the last children saved from disability and even death by this remarkable pediatrician. But, among thousands Jones treated from an office in New Haven, Connecticut, Troy was surely not the only one.

“I still break down at the thought of where we were close to six years ago,” Alison Murphy said of her “walking miracle” and fourth of five sons, Troy. “Dr. Jones was the critical and pivotal person to turn things around for him, and I will forever be grateful for everything he did to bring my boy back.”

Troy had Lyme disease. He seemed to have recovered from the tick-borne infection when, weeks later in early 2016, he was savaged by what was assumed to be a bad flu. This time, however, he lost 20 percent of his body weight, cried incessantly from pain, could not eat or sleep, and was losing control. “What did I do wrong to make this happen?” he asked Dr. Jones in their first traumatic meeting.  (See link for article)

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**Comment**

Turns out Troy not only had Lyme but Borrelia hermsii; Babesia duncani, Bartonella henselae, and mycoplasma pneumonae. No wonder the poor boy was so ill.