Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

Aren't there diseases where someone are caused not by the microbe directly but by the body's immune reaction to it?

> Out of curiosity, do you have any formal training on medicine/physiology or is your knowledge base self-aquired?

Argument from authority (or lack thereof) is pretty contrary to the HN ethos, imo. You're not right because your degree says so, but because the facts do.

I developed the typical Lyme symptoms after spending a lot of time outdoors in a Lyme area and removing ticks from myself several different times. I tested positive for Lyme under the relatively strict CDC criteria from a trusted laboratory. A 28-day course of Doxycycline changed something, but the fatigue and general malaise stuck around. I've spent the next decade consuming every bit of research I could find on the topic.

I'd love as much as anyone for this already FDA-approved antibiotic like Azlocillin to be a miracle cure for my problems. I would gladly welcome properly structured RCTs. However, I've learned to be extremely skeptical of antibiotic therapies for Lyme. Patients who self identify as having "chronic Lyme" are notorious for holding strong beliefs that antibiotics improve their condition after reading about hidden spirochetes and undetectable infection theories for years, but double-blind studies show no benefit.

I think the much more likely explanation is that Lyme can trigger long-lasting alterations in the body somewhere, even after the infection is eliminated.

Sadly, the topic has become so political that mainstream researchers won't touch it. Now that "chronic Lyme" is so closely intertwined with the alternative medicine community, anyone who denies the persistent infection theory is treated as if they are denying the persistent symptoms of sufferers. That couldn't be farther from the truth for me, as I suffer the symptoms myself.

The topic is so politically charged that I only use my pseudonymous alternate account for discussing it online. I've had chronic Lyme sufferers dox me and send vaguely threatening messages in the past, just for discussing the research online. It's no wonder that more researchers don't want to investigate Lyme disease.

Note that cases are reported by state of residence, so even the handful of cases in Arkansas and Missouri are probably attributable to travel to the upper Midwest or Northeast.

However, the Ozarks do have a high incidence of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, so you should still be careful about preventing tick bites and removing them ASAP: https://www.cdc.gov/rmsf/stats/index.html

Well, now you are attacking my humanity. It's very difficult to have constructive dialog about these issues when individuals attack the speaker, and not what's being said. We are talking about public health policy, which necessarily glosses over individual patients who are suffering and aggregates them into cold, sterile statistics in order to make decisions that are best for society. It's not particularly compassionate, but it's unavoidable if you want resource allocation to be proportional to need.

> like you, deny the severity of the problem

This is a straw man argument, where you take a crummy version of my argument and knock it down. "Severity" is not the word I used. I said "level of need", which is different because it takes severity (magnitude) and frequency into account. Progeria is a devastating (severe) disease, but it's also exceptionally uncommon. From a public health standpoint, both are an important part of determining the level of need, and therefore the level of support that these problems receive.

> how would they hear about this trial

from the internet, where the conventional doctors you are assailing created clinicaltrials.gov in order to make such information accessible to everybody.

> But the main reason is that patients don't need the trial, Lyme communities are full of people taking disulfiram on their own and finally recovering.

Nothing makes us happier than when our patients are connected with effective treatments. Nevertheless, the publications you site appear to lack random assignment, placebo control, or a double blind. Therefore I find the data uncompelling, even as I am happy to see that there is a trial for it; I hope it includes these three elements which make the results most meaningful.

Absent that study it remains possible that disulfuram will be the miracle cure you claim that it is, but I'm not expecting that to happen, and I suspect that chronic lyme will be a topic on HN in another 9 months exactly because the needle hasn't moved far enough. Please prove me wrong! That's how big breakthroughs are made! (witness h pylori infection and gastric ulcers). But please excuse me if I don't hold my breath for the announcement, and advocate more more conventional research during that time.

[0] https://experiments.springernature.com/articles/10.1038/npro...