91–100 of 238 posts
Shout-out to Nicholas Zachas (@slicknet, https://humanwhocodes.com ). Thanks for the great JavaScript books, and praying you feel better!
Yeah, he's mentioned once or twice that his is so bad that he can't even write reliably, let alone do speaking gigs or consulting work. Stuff like this scares the shit out of me.
I've recently gotten into backpacking and learned that the most effective way of dealing with mosquitoes and ticks in nature is Permetherin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permethrin . It is intended for clothing and not the skin. The best way to apply it is to soak your clothes and let it dry. Spray on applicators are also available. Once it is dry, it is very stable and safe. It does breakdown with UV and washes, so…
Permethrin in retail outdoor stores can be a bit expensive. In the US, stores that sell military surplus often carry the permethrin kits that are issued to soldiers and they are usually much cheaper and contain enough to cover several clothing items.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...
My father nearly died of [what we believe to be] Lyme disease. A few years ago he started getting awful bouts of pain all over his body. He couldn't eat, was losing weight, was losing muscle mass fast. It got the the point where he was using a walker (he was less than 60 years old at the time) and could barely lift a 5 pound weight. He went to a bunch of different doctors, had all kinds of scans run, and only kept ge…
I would greatly appreciate it if you could find the name of that medication. My sister has Lyme Disease and is still suffering health effects from it despite various treatments.
I've got ticks a few times a year just running in the woods (the last one was Saturday). During holidays in the Pyrenees with my family, we had to scan our bodies for ticks every day, and every day we found several -- up to a dozen -- on each of us. Now the article is very light on the main question: why did ticks multiply that much recently?
why did ticks multiply that much recently? It's because of warmer winters and an exploding deer population. People need to take up hunting again to reduce the numbers of those tick motherships.
> If the urban rat was the primary carrier of bubonic plague, the country mouse is it for Lyme disease.
Explosion of deer and rodent populations is definitely not helping. We were walking with our dog at a local natural area we frequent. A deer crossed the path and we all stopped to take photos, and then moved on. That day we found ticks all over our dog. The deer are literally swimming in them. Both rodents and deer are part of the lifecycle of the tick. Suppressing deer populations and encouraging red foxes and other…
I was bit by a tick and I got sick. No doctor could figure out what was wrong. I tested negative for Lyme. I took antibiotics (Biaxin) and 3 months later I was fine. I stopped taking antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for 6 months. I felt great. I stopped antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for a year. I felt great. I stopped taking antibiotics. Within 2 months I was…
I may or may not have had chronic lyme disease. I definitely had many many ticks. (Never cared about em, just pulled them off). And I definitely was sick for over a decade. And I definitely tested positive on the Western Blot multiple times. (And chronic lyme is definitely a bit of a catch-all diagnosis for a host of auto-immune stuff we don't quite understand yet) It was awful, something I wouldn't wish on anyone. I…
Just a note, Chronic lyme disease isn't really a thing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4477530/ This isn't to say you haven't been dealing with a lot of garbage, just that you might need to seek different medical care if your doctors are telling you that you have chronic lyme disease.
I agree that "alternative medicine" can be a hotbed of pseudo-science and sketchy treatment, but I also think that in terms of a lot of these chronic auto-immune related conditions, our evidence base is still pretty small and there's a lot we don't know. And the dominant Western medical system tends to do much better with acute conditions with a clear etiology of cause/effect than nebulous clusters of symptoms (see also, all of mental health).
My hunch is that chronic lyme, just like for example chronic fatigue that lasts for years after Epstein-Barr, is some sort of auto-immune condition triggered by the initial infection, even if the initial infection is gone. With Lyme it is a little more complicated because there are spirochetes involved.
I assure you I've probably read everything that the NIH has put out about Lyme all the way to some of the wackiest all caps blinking sketchy sell-me-vitamin treatment websites out there, as well as chronic fatigue (I spent the first 7 of those years considering it CFIDS). It nearly destroyed all of my 20s.
Treat prophylatically or not, but try not to get Lyme, that's all I'm saying.
The advice we were given in my veterinary entomology course was to tweeze as close as you could from the base and pull perpendicularly to the skin. You shouldnt yank it, more along the lines of the force you'd use to open a zipper.
