Dave Bexfield was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006 at the age of 37. In the years that followed, he founded ActiveMSers.org, a not-for-profit, science-based website to help others manage the disease, growing it into one of the longest-running and largest MS communities in the world. Recognized as a leading health advocate, Dave has been promoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and written about in countless health publications.

Every attempt to slow his own MS met with failure. Seven disease-modifying therapies. Five clinical trials. A hematopoietic stem cell transplant. Over $2 million in unsuccessful care. By 2021, he was profoundly disabled, wheelchair-bound, and heavily reliant on daily caregiving assistance from his wife of more than 30 years, Laura.

Then, in the fall of 2021—after 15 UTIs in 15 months and a frightening bout of psychosis—Dave made an astonishing discovery: he had been misdiagnosed. Bitten by a tick years earlier in Lyme, Connecticut, he had been living with neurological Lyme disease all along. What followed was five years of obsessive research that led somewhere nobody expected.

Dave is the author of Sit Down Before Reading, a 52-chapter memoir documenting his journey from misdiagnosis to one of the most significant medical discoveries in modern history—the case that Lyme disease, spreading sexually and congenitally for thousands of years and misidentified as autoimmune disease since the 1950s, is the root cause of most chronic illness. Published in real time as he wrote it, the memoir culminates in a 90-page letter to the global medical research community.

He was not prepared for what he found. Neither are you.​