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https://www.ticklab.org/ if you've been bitten, remove the tick carefully and send it in. Free if you're a Pennsylvania resident, might be an equivalent lab in your state. Plus plenty of stats on ticks & diseases by state. Nice thing about ticks is it takes awhile (like 16-24+ hours) to transfer Lyme. Use a fine-tooth comb on scalp and do a thorough body scan after outdoor adventures.
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Tick bites are not mostly avoidable. It is mostly avoidable to have one on you for > 24 hours by checking constantly. Numbers of ticks have increased the past 2 years in my area of NH. I have gotten them walking from my car to the house. Also if you have animals that are treated with tick medicine they bring the ticks inside and then the tick drops off so you can get them in your house.
Can you wear a Tyvek suit (the kind with the attached booties) under a Nomex flight suit with packing tape wrapped around the joints where your suit meets your boots and gloves? Spray Nomex rated permethrin on the flight suit, boots, and gloves, of course.
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The sad part is your acne might have been completely fixed solely through dietary intervention.
Maybe. But severe/cystic acne and the like are rarely solved so simply by dietary intervention. If the acne was so bad as to warrant an Accutane prescription, then my guess is that diet would not have helped much. Accutane can take a large toll on the body but is often one of the most effective tools in eradicating acne long term for those so strongly impacted.
I will not reach for drugs until I have done everything I can in good faith with food and meal timing (24 hours between meals).
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Positive affect changes are a noted possible side effect. The mechanism is unknown. Some scientists believe it's the direct action of the drug on the brain, but others believe it has something to do with altering the natural intestinal flora and a vague "gut-brain connection". It's an area of research waiting to be tackled. I wasn't going to complain about feeling better than normal, only a little disappointed after…
> the scrip ran out. Assuming that was written intentionally, I had no idea that this was a word, and that this was a usage. I’ve learned something.
Scrip is a word, but its meaning is different and it's close to archaic.
Is there an app that can alert me when I'm in a tick-infested area? I don't think about ticks living in CA and I'm deadly afraid of being on a vacation and going on a hike and getting bit.
Ticks in california don't carry lyme typically. I'd be a lot more worried if you were on Long Island or on the east coast generally. If you do get bit though, the bite is very obvious and you'd know. If you catch the tick, you can send it in for testing, although it might be easier just to take the doxy.
Had to take doxycycline for 2 weeks after a tick bite. Man does that stuff destroy your digestive system. 7 years ago was on a date, just casually walking down the street. Coughed a couple times for no particular reason but my doxycycline lined stomach didn’t like that and boom projectile vomiting. Luckily he thought it was funny/ felt bad for me.
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Can you elaborate on affect changes? I had a similar regimen and experienced a weird sense of mental clarity and sociability for a couple of weeks after. Never have figured out what the mechanism was.
Positive affect changes are a noted possible side effect. The mechanism is unknown. Some scientists believe it's the direct action of the drug on the brain, but others believe it has something to do with altering the natural intestinal flora and a vague "gut-brain connection". It's an area of research waiting to be tackled. I wasn't going to complain about feeling better than normal, only a little disappointed after…
I had hypothesized that the antibiotics were either giving my immune system a boost which was tamping down some underlying inflammation somewhere, or were helping fight some intestinal flora that normally cause some subtle mood effects that I wouldn’t normally notice until it was absent. But I was never able to find anything online to pin it down one way or the other.
It's easy for some of us to forget that Lyme disease is an ongoing danger parts of the world. I used to have to keep it in mind when I lived in Tennessee, but that's one thing I don't think about much now that I'm in San Francisco. Of course, I have a lot of other problems instead, just not ticks!
Is there an app that can alert me when I'm in a tick-infested area? I don't think about ticks living in CA and I'm deadly afraid of being on a vacation and going on a hike and getting bit.
Of course that has mostly only helped me when going into areas I know are full of ticks from past experience and can navigate without using trails.
Is there an app that can alert me when I'm in a tick-infested area? I don't think about ticks living in CA and I'm deadly afraid of being on a vacation and going on a hike and getting bit.
Anecdotally, anywhere in New Jersey, southern New York, or Connecticut. I'm not sure about prevalence further north into upstate New York or New England, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was bad there too. Checking for ticks isn't that hard, and bring sharp tweezers if you go out for a day hike or a camping trip. Just make sure you grab it from the head/mouth and don't squeeze the body. I was always told that if you…
Anecdotally, at least half the people on the street I grew up on in Massachusetts had it (and this was before the idea of long term Lyme became widely known, these were acute infections).