[pauleastlund]

I dealt with Lyme Disease about a decade ago. Some of this sounds very familiar -- before I was diagnosed I went to the hospital multiple times sure I was having a heart attack, and each time was told it was just stress.

The neurological symptoms I dealt with were really creepy. I would periodically realize that I had no idea how I had spent the previous day or two. The final straw that led me to seriously start hunting for a diagnosis was a college exam. I came down with a fever just as I was getting ready to prepare for the exam. The fever lasted several days. After I recovered I e-mailed and scheduled a make-up, began to read the material from the exam, experienced profound deja vu, and realized four hours into studying that I had, during my fever, read all the material, gone to class, taken the exam, and lost all memory of having done any of it.

After I got diagnosed I spent years on antibiotics, including most of a year with a PICC line in my arm and most of a year getting regular intramuscular injections. Some of the medications effectively incapacitated me with headaches and brain fog. Metronidazole was hell.

Even so, my case was a very mild one compared to many of the other Lyme sufferers I encountered in my doctor's waiting room. I met people who had lost huge swathes of memory, people who had nearly doubled their body weight practically overnight, people who had developed severe tics. Lyme can be a hell of a disease.

[lisa_henderson]

I also had Lyme and I was also given metronidazole, in combination with other antibiotics. The theory for giving it was that Lyme, during its life cycle, has several forms, including a form that is a bit spore like (that is an informal and non-technical description of what I've read) and normal antibiotics are not effective against the spore form. The theory was that if you had Lyme that recurred often, as I did, it was because some of the Lyme was in a form that could not be reached by stuff such as Biaxin. Therefore, taking a combination of drugs, including metronidazole, was suppose to be more effective than taking any one antibiotic alone. For me, metronidazole did not work, or at least, it did not achieve the goal. It was wonderful for weight loss, but it did not help me beat Lyme. For me, I got over Lyme during an odd episode where I combined Biaxin and fasting (going a week without food, a week when I only had water and high doses of oral Biaxin).

[Herodotus38]

I'm curious why you were given metronidazole: was it for Lyme disease or did you develop a C difficile infection from other antibiotics? I'm just curious because I'm a physician and have never heard of using metronidazole for Lyme disease.

[pauleastlund]

It was for Lyme, and IIRC the justification for including it in my course of treatment was roughly what lisa_henderson describes below.

[Herodotus38]

Thanks, I actually searched initially for metronidazole and lyme disease through pubmed (which is the Google of medical literature) and passed over one interesting article that could support its use (fortunately not behind a paywall):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3132871/

However, this study was done on petri dish cultures of borellia and didn't actually look at whether or not it improved symptoms in people (which I imagine is a difficult thing to study in this field).

When I searched for borrellia and metronidazole there was one more article for in vitro use from the 1990s: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10379684