[Arete314159]

Back before antibiotics, they used to call syphilis "The Great Imitator." The disease, caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria known as a spirochete, could cause so many different kinds of problems it seemed like 10 diseases in one.

Genetically, Lyme Disease is very close to syphilis. It's also a spirochete, and it is the new "Great Imitator." (1) The main difficult thing about Lyme Disease is that the tests for it currently are not that good. There are a lot of false positives / negatives, and there is no test that show whether a patient has been cured, only whether they've ever been infected.

Neurological Lyme aka neuroborreliosis can cause a number of neurological / psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms like OCD. Doctors never check for Lyme when a patient presents with sudden onset psych problems, even though it's a known cause.

TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.

(1) interesting side note -- there are some studies that suggest it can also be sexually transmitting and/or transmitted from mother to child

[crankylinuxuser]

> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.

Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.

[bin0]

If you've got a case bad enough to cause mysterious problems, it's a very bad idea to "just nuke it". Firstly, die-off reactions are a concern. Secondly, the treatment can be very serious (i.v. antibiotics in many cases). Thirdly, antibiotics are not really healthy, though not horribly. However, with the growing body of research surrounding the issue of gut health and its impacts, I'm not sure I'd want to take antibiotics without being sure.

With respect to false positives/negatives, use the igenex test. If you get a good doctor, he'll know how to interpret the results better; you can have high results in certain bands which the CDC does not usually consider relevant but which can still be indicative.

All that aside, no responsible doc "just gives you the drugs". Let's not forget there are a thousand things it could be; just giving the drugs for all would probably kill you. Also, that's how we end up with resistant bacteria.

[crankylinuxuser]

6 years ago, my wife and I went camping. I ended up over the course getting bit by no less than 15 ticks of various genuses.

I got rocky mountain spotted fever, and was treated for that. It's easy to see cause your body gets spots along with pretty nasty illness. During that course, I was also treated for Lyme as well.

The key here: I was bitten by the primary carriers of lyme and spotted fever, and had one of those diseases. I'm not recommending everybody be given lyme antiparasiticals - but use some critical thought here. We can tell when we've upped our risk significantly. And some doc that talks for 5 min sure doesn't really have much vested interest.

[papln]

"die-off" seems plausible, but why are all the web-search results for "die-off" showing minor blogs and snake-oil stores, and none of the big medical sites like mayo, webmd, healthline, or mainstream news sites?

[oblongx]

Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarisch%E2%80%93Herxheimer_rea...

[A4B7h]

This is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

1) There are different strains of Lyme disease (and other tick-borne diseases) and certain antibiotics are more effective than others.

2) Using antibiotics where it turns out they might not be needed only contributes to growing antibiotic ineffectiveness.

[jcomis]

The problem is Lyme tests are not conclusive, even when Lyme's is a prime suspect. But yes, I supposed you could always just go for the treatment.