The Lyme Wars (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)

#51

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Oct 22, 2014, 1:27 PM UTC

jonweber wrote: post #49

My dad got Lyme on the Appalachian Trail five years ago, and still has symptom flare-ups regularly. Lyme has a habit of converting anybody affected by it into an activist, which probably stems from the controversy over diagnosis and treatment of things like chronic Lyme. Earlier this year I founded TickChek.com, a startup that offers PCR-based laboratory tick testing that can determine whether or not a tick that bit…

Cool service! Is it possible to have insurance pay for this? Is it hard to send ticks through the mail?

Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)

#52

Post by jonweber » Wed, Oct 22, 2014, 4:54 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #51

jonweber wrote: post #49

My dad got Lyme on the Appalachian Trail five years ago, and still has symptom flare-ups regularly. Lyme has a habit of converting anybody affected by it into an activist, which probably stems from the controversy over diagnosis and treatment of things like chronic Lyme. Earlier this year I founded TickChek.com, a startup that offers PCR-based laboratory tick testing that can determine whether or not a tick that bit…

Cool service! Is it possible to have insurance pay for this? Is it hard to send ticks through the mail?

Most insurance companies don't cover tick testing, unfortunately. We've never had any problems sending ticks through the mail though. People usually send 'em in sandwich bags inside normal envelopes, alive or dead.

Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)

#53

Post by flatline » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 2:11 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #50

flatline wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom was bitten by a tick in Colorado and given a 2 week course of antibiotics when she started to feel ill. She got better then promptly got worse as soon as they ran out. Over the next six months she progressively worsened until she could only get out of bed for a couple hours a day. Finally she found out about Lyme disease - many doctors do not believe that it even occurs in Colorado so she didn't know what was…

Did they test her for Lyme disease? Did she have the active anti-bodies?

Just saw this reply, a couple weeks late, but:

Yes, and no, at least not initially. I believe they repeated the test and it came back positive at a later date. So it seems likely that she got something from the tick, probably in part Lyme. The Lyme test is reputed to have a high false negative rate, not sure to what extent this is true.