Steven Phillips, MD is a well published, internationally recognized, Yale-trained physician specializing in the chronic manifestations of zoonotic infections, such as Lyme disease, bartonellosis, and countless others. He has been in private practice in CT since 1996, where he has treated more than 20,000 of the most complex patients from approximately 20 countries.
Dr. Phillips has lectured at innumerable medical conferences across the US and Europe, repeatedly served as an invited Lyme disease expert for the states of CT, NY, RI, and VT, participated in health policy meetings in Sweden, and was one of only a handful of physicians invited to testify at the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s Lyme Disease Hearing in Washington DC in ’09. His 81 page 226 reference written testimony from that hearing, wherein he cites the medical literature documenting evidence of persistent infection in chronic Lyme, remains a standard to this day. He is the recipient of the Emerging Leader Award from Bay Area Lyme Foundation, and was honored by Harvard University’s Dean Center as part of their “Person Who Inspires Us” campaign. A global face of the chronic illness pandemic, he’s been featured in a range of major media, including the Emmy Winning documentary “Lyme and Reason.”
He's not just an expert in the field of chronic illness due to infection. He's also a patient. In 2010, he got a seemingly innocuous bug bite while sleeping in his bed at home. Within 2 months of the bite, he could barely walk, and after that he not only lost his ability to walk for the next almost 2 years, he came very close to death. His rapidly progressive disease baffled 25 physicians, including infectious disease, neurologists, and rheumatologists, the latter of whom diagnosed him with two serious autoimmune disorders and pushed immune suppressants which Dr. Phillips refused because the label of autoimmune disease made no sense--Before the bug bite, he could run 5 miles.
Lyme doctors thought it could be Lyme, but over a year of their best treatments didn't help him. Spoiler alert: It wasn't Lyme. Ironically, it was Dr. Phillips himself who was ultimately able to put the pieces together to save his own life. If there's any universal purpose for the suffering he endured, it's his hope that the lessons he learned, in the hardest of ways, can help others. He went from being unable to turn over in bed without assistance and not being to lift his arms against gravity, to having a rich and full life. Going from full disability to full ability, he's been back in practice since 2013, and even did two European speaking tours, in 2015 and 2016, basically walking all over the continent.
And then COVID19 shattered the world. At the very beginning of this new pandemic, while seeing patients from all over, he came down with a mysteriously aggressive flu-like illness that went straight to his lungs. He threw everything he could at it, which was before anyone knew anything about what to do for COVID19, and he recovered. He quickly realized the seriousness of this new virus when others were still downplaying it. He converted his practice to telemedicine months earlier than his colleagues, who thought he was just an alarmist, until they were proven wrong. Since then he's championed out-patient, life-saving therapies for early COVID19, which has been in stark contrast to the mantra of "sicken in place" until the final stages of illness, at which time, sadly, treatments don't work well. As of the time of this writing, not a single of the many COVID19 patients treated by Dr. Phillips has even required hospitalization.
Almost a year into the COVID19 pandemic, countless cases of long-COVID have occurred, displaying chronic illness strikingly similar to what he's been seeing in his practice for the past 25 years. Baffled doctors haven't had answers for these patients, but Dr. Phillips has had an advantage. He's had years of experience in unraveling complex, chronic illness. He soon realized that the basic tenets of how to dismantle the complexities of other chronic illness patients can be applied to long-COVID as well. And so a chapter devoted to the complexities of COVID19, with a strong emphasis on long-COVID, was added to the book. Many experts were interviewed and the most logical potential causes of long-Covid were explored. The results of his investigation and reasoning, both timely and vital to an ever-growing population of long-Covid patients, can provide some much needed clarity and hope.
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