With medical gaslighting, people are told, 'Don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree.' Doctors shouldn’t confuse their medical degree with someone intuitively knowing their body & wanting to be both informed & heard.
Dr. Will Cole
Further Reading
Accuracy of a Negative Lyme Disease Test
Often a patient is told that they have had a negative Lyme Disease test, so therefore their symptoms cannot be due to Lyme disease. This article, funded by the CDC and performed by highly regarded US universities, demonstrated that routine testing picks up Lyme disease only about 32% of the time! Thus,a negative test Does NOT Rule Out chronic persistent Lyme disease. Many other studies confirm the low sensitivity of the routine Two-stage Lyme Disease test methodology. This study, by leading Lyme disease treating physicians, stated that the two-tier test methodology was positive one-third of cases in the acute setting and two-thirds in the convalescent setting. This study demonstrated an overall sensitivity of the two-tier test methodology of 66% and amazingly for Lyme carditis of 71%. (see Table 1 under the last column, STTT -Standard Two Tiered Test)
Bullseye Rash
This poster from Johns’ Hopkins University states that 75% of Lyme disease patients get a rash but that only 20% of those rashes have the classic “bullseye” appearance that most physicians and others recognize as a Lyme disease rash. This means that only 15% of patients with Lyme disease have the classically appearing bull’seye rash. Please do not accept that: “You did not get a bull’s-eye rash so you can’t have Lyme disease.”
Duration of Tick Bite Attachment
While it is true that, in the typical case, it takes 24-36 hours of tick attachment before the tick can transmit Lyme disease to you, there are situations where the attachment time can be as low as 4 hours for transmission to occur. This occurs when either the Lyme bacteria was already in the tick's salivary gland from the time of its infection, or from partial feeding such that it attached to another host, consumed blood, had to dislodge and search for another host to complete its blood meal, and now it already has the Lyme bacteria in its salivary glands due to the partially fed first blood meal. More on this here.
Evidence for Effective Treatment of Chronic Lyme
There are four CDC funded studies investigating the effectiveness of the treatment of Chronic Persistent Lyme Disease. There are links to them below.
The above propose that the evidence is against the effectiveness of treating Chronic Persistent Lyme disease. However, the data in fact shows that the effectiveness of treatment is confirmed by the two studies that have the statistical power to make that assessment. Please see this article from Brown University department of biostatistics that analyses the studies and confirms this.
Note that in these four studies, there is a combined number of study patients of only 241! That’s right; 241 total patients in the four studies to research a hotly contested effect of treatment from an illness that may affect 500,000 Americans per year with a rate of chronic sequela of perhaps 10 – 20%.
Prophylactic Treatment of a Tick Bite
This study is a meta-analysis of prophylactic treatment of a tick bite that ends up proposing the effectiveness of prophylactic treatment. Most people assume this to mean a single 200 mg dose of doxycycline. However, three of the four studies in this meta-analysis used 10 day doses of antibiotics. Thus this was not an assessment of a single dose prophylaxis as it seems to be implied.
Low Dose Naltrexone
Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) is sometimes used for chronic inflammation and other conditions involved in Chronic Persistent Lyme Disease. Here is an article that discusses LDN.
Tick Testing
When you remove a tick, please consider sending the tick to TickReport.com. Knowing what pathogens this particular tick carried and confirming the identification of the tick can be very helpful.