* Lyme disease is a controversial illness. Two medical societies, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), have developed conflicting guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of this tick-borne disease.
* Recent publications by IDSA members have impugned the scientific basis of the ILADS viewpoint, attributing that viewpoint to an ‘Axis of Evil’ involving physicians who treat improperly, ‘specialty laboratories’ that test inaccurately and the internet, which promotes ‘Lyme hysteria’.
* An investigation by the Connecticut Attorney General found that the IDSA suppressed scientific evidence and had significant conflicts of interest in developing its Lyme disease guidelines. An impartial scientific panel will be established to review the IDSA guidelines.
* The discredited ‘Axis of Evil’ comment affords an opportunity to examine the conflicts at the root of Lyme disease diagnosis and treatment.
(from Future Microbiol. 2008;3(6):621-624. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/586226 )
and
He and his colleagues also found that almost 47% of the chronic Lyme disease patients qualified for a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. “Sleep disturbance is common in most patients with fibromyalgia and this appeared to be the case in many of our chronic Lyme disease subjects,” Dr. Hassett mentioned. (from Arthritis Rheum 2008;59:1742-1749 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/585949)
I think that your doctor when insisting on a short treatment just was following IDSA, however, in my view, the information available strongly suggests that it is important to have a a longer treatment.
The key issue here is:
The second link in the ‘Axis of Evil’ is the group of ‘specialty laboratories’ that provide ‘questionable’ testing for Lyme disease. Ironically it is the patented commercial Lyme tests that are questionable.[32,44] The two-tier Lyme test system endorsed by the IDSA requires a patented, commercially-available IgG screening immunoassay followed by a patented, commercially-available confirmatory western blot. Although this test system has a very high specificity of 99%, meaning that there are very few false positives, the system has a sensitivity ranging from 8-56% based on recent population studies, meaning that the algorithm has ‘coin-toss’ diagnostic utility at best and may miss as many as nine out of ten Lyme cases.[32-35,44] By contrast, antibody testing for HIV has a sensitivity of 99.5%, meaning that it misses only one in 200 HIV infections. The insensitive Lyme test system assures that many Lyme patients will go undiagnosed and untreated, a problem compounded by the IDSA mandate that diagnosis requires a positive commercial test result. Hence, the search for more sensitive testing offered by laboratories that have established superior assays for Lyme disease[36] is a direct response to the flawed commercial Lyme tests and the IDSA mandate that diagnosis rests on these flawed tests.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/586226
You should ask your doctor for a longer treatment and send him the above links. Borrelia burgdorferi is a bacteria, not a parasite, but it is correct that a co-infection with a parasite, not is uncommon. This might give Human granulocytic ehrlichiosis and/or even babesiosis.
Human granulocytic ehrlichiosis has a new name Human granulocytic anaplasmosis as it is caused by the obligate intracellular bacteria Anaplasma phagocytophilum, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no12/05-0898.htm
Thanks for both of those.
Anyone remember IBM CEO Louis Gerstner. He was the CEO before the current one. He had been the head of Philip Morris before that.
His brother had been a top guy at IBM before Louis went there. The brother was moving up until he got very sick. He had Lyme disease and they had a hard time diagnosing it. This occured back in the early 1990s I think.
Borellia Burgdorfi is a spirochete: different from a bacteria, no? V’s wife.