U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Dear Secretary Kennedy,
My name is Arthur Brent Porter. I am 61 years old, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, and I am in my twentieth year with Lyme disease. My symptoms began in January 2007, while I was working as a graduate research assistant at the University of Oklahoma in a renovated dormitory that had been converted into a training center. I carry Bartonella and Babesia as well, and laboratory work from September 2024 documented Aspergillus mycotoxins at roughly eight times the upper reference range and CD57 at 35 against a reference range of 60 to 360.
On May 29, 2026, you announced a national initiative to reduce Lyme disease cases 25 percent by 2035. It includes standardized treatment protocols, $2.5 million in innovation challenges, and a public-private collaboration to help patients connect with experienced providers. Two million dollars of it is designated for work that helps patients with Lyme "and other invisible illnesses get answers faster and access care more quickly."
I am writing because I am a documented instance of the failure that program exists to correct — and because two offices inside your Department are the reason I still cannot get treatment.
In December 2024, I underwent a Comprehensive Diagnostic and Treatment Evaluation at Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, in the Department of Psychiatry chaired by Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff. My family paid $15,000 for it.
I did not want to go, and I said why in writing before I traveled: I had active, documented tick-borne infection, and psychiatric diagnosis requires that medical causes be ruled out first. That is not my opinion — it is a diagnostic prerequisite. I was told to come anyway.
Dell's own signed report acknowledges, in its Chief Complaint section, that I was there under financial coercion. Their words: my parents had provided an ultimatum of completing the evaluation or losing financial support, and I acquiesced. Under APA Ethical Standards 3.10 and 9.03, that voids informed consent. They proceeded regardless.
I brought my labs. When I raised the tick-borne infection, I was told that IgG indicates past infection. I said that IgG can also be consistent with ongoing infection, which you know is not a fringe position but an active dispute in the literature and the central controversy in the standard two-tier testing framework. It was set aside. Their final report reflects that it was set aside.
They diagnosed me with Somatic Symptom Disorder — a condition defined by physical symptoms disproportionate to identifiable medical cause — in a patient holding laboratory documentation of tick-borne infection, immune suppression, and mold toxicity, three months old.
I want to say plainly what I believe happened, because I do not think a clinical euphemism describes it.
I had spent months telling my family that I was not being heard, and that the pattern in how we communicated was part of why I was not getting well. They did not want to hear it. What they wanted was a professional document establishing that the problem was me.
They paid $15,000 for one. The evaluation was arranged through a family friend who sits on Dell Medical School's advisory board. Dell took the money, was told in writing beforehand that the patient objected and that the medical prerequisite was unmet, wrote the coercion into their own intake notes, and proceeded to produce exactly the document that was paid for.
Every physician who signed that report took an oath. Seven of them signed it.
I cannot prove what anyone intended. I can tell you what is in the file: a coerced patient, a paid-for evaluation, an advisory board relationship, documented infection set aside, standardized scores written down below their published classification, and a diagnosis code entered that the same report says had no evidence behind it. That is not a doctor making an honest mistake about a hard case. Honest mistakes scatter. Every element here ran the same direction — toward the party holding the checkbook.
And the effect, which is the part still running: my infections were not treated. They still have not been treated. That is nineteen months.
The final report states plainly that there was "no evidence of any mania." Bipolar disorder appears nowhere among the diagnoses.
Yet a laboratory order dated December 12, 2024 — during the evaluation — carries ICD-10 code F31.9, Bipolar Disorder, unspecified. It was never disclosed to me. I learned of it only after the federal Office for Civil Rights compelled partial production of my own records.
On February 2 and again on March 2, 2026, I received invitations to enroll in a bipolar disorder research study at UT Austin, addressed to me by name, stating I might be eligible because I had been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. The study involves annual blood draws and MRI scans. I am on Medicare.
A diagnosis code with no clinical finding behind it, contradicted by the treating institution's own signed report, generating federal research recruitment for a Medicare beneficiary. I am not a lawyer and I will not characterize it. I am telling you what is in the file.
There is one more entry in that file, and it is the one I would most want an investigator to look at. On February 4, 2025 I formally challenged the findings. Afterward the record itself changed: Narcissistic Personality Disorder was removed, and an Adjustment Disorder was inserted — backdated to January 15, 2025. Had that diagnosis existed on January 15, the February 3 report signed by seven faculty would have reflected it. It did not. I have both versions. A medical record that moves after the patient objects is not a clinical judgment. It is an audit question, and the EHR timestamps would answer it in an afternoon.
Mr. Secretary, this is the part I am asking you to look at, because it is yours.
The Office for Civil Rights. My first complaint required federal intervention before The University of Texas would produce my records at all. What they produced was incomplete — it did not include a letter my sister confirmed in writing, on April 23, 2025, that she had sent to the evaluating clinician, Dr. Erin Logue — describing it herself as "meant to be confidential" and containing content that "could be hurtful." UT Health Austin stated on November 12, 2025 that no such document exists in my file. Both statements cannot be true. I filed a second complaint. In December 2025 OCR informed me it would not investigate. No reason was given.
The Office of Inspector General. I filed a complaint on February 10, 2026. It has not been answered.
Both offices are inside the Department you lead. And so is the initiative you announced in May, whose stated purpose is helping patients with invisible illnesses get answers faster and reach experienced providers.
I am one of those patients. Your Department is currently the obstacle.
Let me be concrete about why I am not in treatment, because I do not want to be poetic about it.
A nine-month antibiotic protocol for chronic tick-borne infection is physically punishing. It requires capacity — to show up, to manage die-off reactions, to keep going when it makes you worse before better. I have a finite amount of that, and Lyme has reduced it considerably.
For nineteen months, all of it has gone into trying to correct a medical record that says something untrue about my mind. Not into treatment. Into records requests, complaint filings, appeals, and documentation. I cannot do both. Nobody in my condition could do both.
That is what the false record cost. Not a metaphor — the actual hours and the actual energy that were supposed to go toward killing bacteria.
Mr. Secretary, here is what I would most like an answer to.
I am a UT Austin alumnus. I scored in the 97th percentile on the standardized cognitive testing that Dell Medical School itself administered — a fact I know only because it is in their own report, in the same paragraph where they wrote it down as something lesser. I can read a lab panel. I can build a timeline. I can find the contradiction between page two and page nine of a document and explain it in writing.
And it still took federal intervention to get part of my own file, the withheld document is still withheld, the Texas Medical Board declined, your Office for Civil Rights closed my case with no reason stated, and your Inspector General has not written back.
If that is what happens to the patient best equipped to document it, what is happening to the ones who are not?
Two questions follow from that, and neither is rhetorical.
At Dell Medical School: How many other people have been through that Comprehensive Diagnostic and Treatment Evaluation Program? What were their circumstances? How many arrived under family pressure with a third party paying? Nobody has looked. The program should be audited — every evaluation, every patient. Not because I say so. Because a single documented case of a purchased conclusion at a public medical school is sufficient cause to check whether there were others, and there is no mechanism currently doing that.
At the Office for Civil Rights: If my complaint — documented, sourced, with a paper trail and a written admission from the sender of the missing document — was closed with no reason given, how many complaints are being closed that way? What is the current rate? Who reviews those closures? I am not accusing anyone at OCR of anything. I am telling you I received a decision with no reasoning attached, and I do not know whether that is exceptional or routine, and I think you would want to know which.
You have built an initiative on the premise that Lyme patients are not being heard. I am telling you that the offices inside your own Department are part of the reason, and that I cannot be the only one.
The complete documentation is at bowandvector.com. Every document referenced here exists and is available to your staff on request.
Respectfully,
Arthur "Brent" Porter
B.A. Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 1987
M.Ed., The University of Oklahoma, 2008