In 2002, Kris Newby and her husband spent a week at their friend’s place in Chilmark. They had been warned about ticks and checked themselves every day of their stay. Though they didn’t find any ticks on themselves they both fell ill within weeks of their return to their home in California. One year and eight doctors later they finally were diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease.

Ms. Newby was told by doctors in California that she had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting Lyme disease. Now she is the co-producer of Under Our Skin, a documentary about the politics of the disease and the thousands of patients like Ms. Newby and her husband who suffered after their doctors failed to properly diagnose them.

The movie will have its Martha’s Vineyard debut tomorrow at Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. But its harsh view of many in the medical community already is drawing criticism from Island physicians.

Lyme disease is a major problem on Martha’s Vineyard. Often called an epidemic, Lyme is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, and it occurs on the Island at a higher rate than anywhere else.

Aside from Lyme, ticks can also transmit babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia. And ticks are small and hard to detect; a deer tick nymph can easily be mistaken for a freckle.

Health specialists recommend daily tick checks, focusing on the warm, dark spots of the body and under the hair line. Ticks should be removed quickly and carefully with tweezers. Make sure to get the head of the tick, which can remain lodged in the skin even after the body is removed. If you are bitten, see a doctor immediately.

Summer is high season for ticks and this summer is no exception. Dr. Gerry Yukevich at the Vineyard Walk-in Medical Center is seeing high levels of patients with tick bites.

“I’ve already seen four today and it’s not even noon yet,” he said Thursday. “We see a lot of it.”

But Dr. Yukevich also is one of the doctors concerned by the tone of Under Our Skin. Upon viewing the film, Dr. Yukevich sent an e-mail to other Island medical professionals notifying them of Saturday’s 8 p.m. screening of a movie he believes makes doctors look either fanatical about the disease, insensitive and ignorant of it, or even party to a conspiracy to deny the legitimacy of chronic Lyme for the benefit of insurance companies.

“I think it’s a little dramatic,” Dr. Yukevich said. “It breeds a degree of anxiety rather than stimulate a dispassionate approach to the epidemic of Lyme disease.”

The film’s Web site, underourskin.com, states, “As suspenseful and hair-splitting as any Hollywood thriller, Under Our Skin is sure to get under yours.”

Though the film’s director and co-producer, Andy Abrahams Wilson, admits he wanted to make the movie dramatic and engaging, he said he did not go as far as to sensationalize the issue.

“I want to shake people up. I want Lyme disease to be something that for example AIDS has become,” he said Wednesday from his office in San Francisco. He explained parallels he sees between the history of the two diseases and how the medical community has reacted to them. HIV-AIDS, he said, was always the disease of others, not taken seriously until it went mainstream.

“I want this film to be the media event that turns the tide, blows the lid off the cover,” he said. The film’s subtitle is The Untold Story of Lyme Disease.

Mr. Wilson and his team started working on the film four years ago. They interviewed more than 100 experts and spoke with thousands of patients.

“When people found out we were making this film, we were flooded with calls. People wanted to tell their stories,” Mr. Wilson said. “I was surprised by the number of people whose lives have been destroyed by this disease.”

Ms. Newby conducted the research for the film. She read years of literature, identified experts and followed the money trail to find out who was benefiting from the restricted definition of Lyme.

Five years after being treated for Lyme, Ms. Newby and her husband are better but there are still problems. She gets occasional symptoms and when they get bad she has to go back on antibiotics. But after interviewing subjects for the film, she said, she realized she and her husband were lucky because they were at least functional now. “Many thousands were not so lucky,” she said, adding:

“What breaks my heart is that I love Martha’s Vineyard and I’m afraid to go back now.”