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I recommend that you read the full article, but I have included excerpts of what I thought were the important sections:

A number of celebrities including Bella Hadid, Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake claim to have Lyme disease, but some doctors worry this could mislead people into thinking they too could have the disease.

Lyme disease is a medically recognized infection that can cause pain, fatigue and muscle aches. But many celebrities — including Hadid, American singer Justin Timberlake and Canadian singer Justin Bieber — who claim they have Lyme appear, on a closer look, to be describing chronic Lyme disease, a condition that isn’t recognized by conventional medicine.

It's a controversial term used by some alternative practitioners to describe pain, fatigue and neurological symptoms they attribute to a persistent Lyme infection. Often, patients have never tested positive through a regulator-approved Lyme disease test.

Despite the shaky validity, identifying otherwise-unexplainable symptoms as chronic Lyme can seem like a path toward getting better, Dr. Paul Auwaerter, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told CBC News.

“They are looking for answers to something that many times they get short shrift from their regular physicians or from consultants.”

But experts warn that the world of private testing and treatment is largely unregulated — and can carry serious risk.

In one case, an attempt to treat chronic Lyme became life-threatening.

Feile O'Connell from Tofino, B.C. told CBC News she almost died after undergoing an unproven treatment in Mexico.

The 30-year-old said she’d been struggling to get help for ongoing severe fatigue and pain for years. She hasn't been able to work, and said the health-care system has let her down.

A doctor tested her for Lyme disease, but the result was negative. She said she kept trying to get answers from doctors, but only got the runaround.

"I can't even count how many specialists I saw,” she told CBC News. “They would say, 'I can't help you. This is all that I can do, so go back to your family doctor,' which I didn't have at the time... I kept being pushed back to square one."

As her symptoms worsened, she turned to a naturopath, paying for out-of-country blood tests that came back positive for Lyme disease, she said. (The Canadian medical system only recognizes Health Canada-approved test results.)

“I felt validated for the first time," O'Connell said.

After trying alternative treatments in Canada for months, in the summer of 2024 she ended up at Lyme Mexico, a clinic that claims to specialize in treating Lyme disease, run by Omar Morales. All in, she said her treatment and accommodations cost over $40,000.

“He’s selling hope,” she said. “All we want is to get better and he has the path.”

At Lyme Mexico, she said she received an intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) treatment, where the antibodies from donated plasma are used mainly to strengthen the immune system. She said this made her violently ill.

O’Connell said she ended up in a local intensive care unit with sepsis, a life-threatening condition caused by an infection. She later contacted the pharmaceutical company with the lot number of the product.

"We conclude that these units have been subject to a fraudulent transaction and there is a high probability that the unit administered to the patient has been falsified/manipulated,” CSL Behring stated in a letter to O'Connell.

In an email to CBC News, Lyme Mexico’s patient director Sandy Rodriguez said the clinic could not comment on individual cases due to privacy regulations.

“Lyme Mexico is a licensed medical facility, and all treatments are provided by qualified physicians under established safety and informed-consent protocols,” she wrote.

Asked for proof of those qualifications, the clinic wouldn’t provide them.

Several other patients who spoke to CBC News said they were satisfied with the care they received.

Unmet health-care needs

Time and again, what’s driving people toward the chronic Lyme industry is a lack of effective, long-term health care, said Saxinger.

“The thinner the medical system gets stretched, the less likely someone… is going to be able to get significant time from the routine medical system,” she said.

There’s also a need for more research into chronic illnesses to help those suffering, Auwaerter said.

“This has been quite an underfunded area for many years,” he said.

O’Connell, the woman from B.C., said she still has ongoing symptoms. She said she is still pursuing treatment for chronic Lyme disease, and is working with a naturopath who’s prescribed her antibiotics.

She said what would make a difference for patients struggling with chronic illness is more empathy and understanding from physicians.

“People are really cast aside when they have these mysterious chronic illnesses,” she said, “and they're just left to fend for themselves.”