DID YOU KNOW?........
- The month of May was Lyme Disease Awareness Month!
- The movie about Lyme Disease "Under Our Skin" by Open Eye Pictures has been released. This film was the winner for: Official Selection at the Tribeca and Silverdocs Film Festivals; AND Best Documentary at the Camden Int'l, Durango Ind., Sonoma Int'l, Houston Int'l Film Festivals.
- Teton Data Systems (TDS) the maker of STAT!Ref got its start from the study of Lyme Disease?...
A BRIEF HISTORY of TDS and STAT!Ref:
A graduate of Stanford University, Dr. Richard Sugden received his medical degree from Baylor college of Medicine in Houston.
He served in the military at the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute Flight Surgery Training program, and at the Naval Air Test Center U.S.N. Test Pilot School, NATC and as a TPS Flight Surgeon. He did Residency Training at Baylor College of Medicine Affiliate Hospital in Houston, Texas.
Dr. Sugden founded Teton Data Systems (TDS) after recognizing a need that physicians had for finding medical information quickly.
Back in 1987, a fellow physician from Big Piney called Dr. Sugden for a consult on a pregnant patient with some unique symptoms. Although he suspected Lyme disease, he didn’t know the best course of treatment. Researching this took hours back then, thumbing through reference books. He thought, this is ridiculous! So, he wrote a program to make the info in Scientific American searchable on a Macintosh computer. These were the humble beginnings of STAT!Ref. Every year, more titles were added to the CD-ROMs and eventually TDS started offering STAT!Ref online (STAY TUNED FOR THE RELEASE OF THE NEW USER INTERFACE!).
He’s currently a private practice family physician and has been practicing in Jackson, Wyoming since 1975. He also has a free clinic in Jackson and keeps busy providing care to patients. He provides guidance to TDS, and uses STAT!Ref daily in his practice.
BACKGROUND ON THE MAKING OF "UNDER OUR SKIN":
In the early 1970's, a mysterious illness was discovered among children living around the town of Lyme, CT. What was first diagnosed as isolated cases of juvenile arthritis, eventually became known as Lyme disease, one of the most misunderstood and controversial illnesses of our time. Today, many of those untreated will suffer chronic debilitating illness. Some unknowingly will pass the disease on to their unborn children. Many will lose their livelihoods, and still others, their lives.
Difficult to test accurately, tens of thousands of people go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The Centers for Disease Control admits that more than 400,000 people may acquire Lyme disease each year, a number ten times greater than AIDS and West Nile Virus combined.
