The great Lyme debate...

(read the disclaimer at the bottom of the blog - Nothing here is intended as medical advice )


There is a newsday story at
http://www.newsday.com/search/ny-hscov5223177may22,0,4347013.story?page=1
about the two schools of thought regarding Lyme disease. On one hand, there are those who believe that Lyme is not being adequately diagnosed and that Doctors are not free enough to proscribe adequate courses of antibiotics. On the other hand, there are those who believe that people are being diagnosed with Lyme when they have other diseases and that too many antibiotics are being used. Which is correct?

She doesn't remember an actual tick bite or classic bull's-eye rash, but
her doctors found evidence that the common Borrelia bacteria have been in her
body.

There are some people who believe that the lack of the bullseye rash is because the person's defenses didn't work properly. Therefore the people without the rash are more susceptible to lyme. Also, if I get a rash in the middle of my lower back, the chances of me spotting it are almost zero unless I do the exorcist head thing..

"There are a lot of people who think they have Lyme disease but don't," said Dr.
Raymond Dattwyler, an infectious disease expert

Yes, and there are a lot of doctors who diagnose Lyme as other diseases. When we first encountered Lyme, a neurologist claimed my wife had MS even though her symptoms were not consistent with MS. He scoffed when we asked about Lyme disease. Later DNA testing for Lyme showed that she did in fact have Lyme.

Fallon, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, said that
in the study the antibiotics worked initially on reducing pain, fatigue and
mental fog, but six months later patients were no better than those who did not
receive long-term therapy.

That, in a nutshell is one of the problems with Lyme. Many people who get it, never seem to be able to shake all of the symptoms. One theory I've heard is that the disease gets deep into the fatty tissue and some areas where blood supply is thinner. If you aren't getting blood, is it possible that the antibiotics aren't reaching the disease and reservoirs exist? Supposedly aerobic exercise helps kill the disease, perhaps because more blood is reaching more parts of the body.

. . .infectious disease doctors worry that people with all sorts of unexplained symptoms are being routed to Lyme doctors who will treat
with long-term antibiotics - despite studies that suggest those treatments don't
work. (Stony Brook neurologist Dr. Lauren Krupp and her colleagues also did a
monthlong study and found no difference between those receiving antibiotics and
those getting a placebo. The results of the study were published in
2003.)

If the study was only a month, I'd have questions about that. Again, I'm not a doctor, but I know it took a couple of months before my symptoms started to get under control. Also, our doctor was alternating antibiotics, mostly oral, but some injections (Still hurts thinking about those BIG needles). Another issue with the article is that it does not address other tick borne disease that might be present such as erlichosis and Babesis. If the latter is present, it requires a whole different course of treatment.

"The potential for harm is enormous," Boston University's Klempner
said. "Patients have died, and others have had infections" because of the
intravenous lines

IV treatment can be scary. Fortunately, as I noted earlier, our treatment was oral and injections in the posterior.

The infection doesn't take hold right away, and experts say removing the
tick soon after it is discovered is the best prevention.

That is a LOT easier said than done.. First off, the nymphs are smaller than the periods in these sentences. The tick itself is about the size of a lower case o depending on your screen. How many of us have someone check every inch of our body looking for one of these critters? Are we all doing the Yul Brynner routine and shaving our heads and other parts of our body? What about all those age spots? What about people with darker complexions? The problem here is that one bite in a place where you don't notice it can really mess up your life.

By the way, there are a number of products that allow you to remove a tick without squishing it which would inject the disease into you. That's a topic for another post.

The Lyme bacterium can also travel into the central nervous system if not
treated immediately. And this can trigger Lyme meningitis (stiff neck and
pounding headaches) and Bell's palsy (temporary paralysis of the facial
muscles).

Make no mistake, Lyme is serious stuff. We really need a lot more research to understand exactly what is happening with Lyme and other tick related diseases. We need to properly understand it and educate people as to how to prevent it.

If you have symptoms that are indicative of Lyme, you will need to make a decision as to which of the two schools of thought you believe will help cure you. That might be one of the most important decisions of your life. The problem is, there is no one right answer.....