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Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

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Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#11

Post by crankylinuxuser »

bin0 wrote: post #8
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests. Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.

If you've got a case bad enough to cause mysterious problems, it's a very bad idea to "just nuke it". Firstly, die-off reactions are a concern. Secondly, the treatment can be very serious (i.v. antibiotics in many cases). Thirdly, antibiotics are not really healthy , though not horribly. However, with the growing body of research surrounding the issue of gut health and its impacts, I'm not sure I'd want to take antib…

6 years ago, my wife and I went camping. I ended up over the course getting bit by no less than 15 ticks of various genuses.

I got rocky mountain spotted fever, and was treated for that. It's easy to see cause your body gets spots along with pretty nasty illness. During that course, I was also treated for Lyme as well.

The key here: I was bitten by the primary carriers of lyme and spotted fever, and had one of those diseases. I'm not recommending everybody be given lyme antiparasiticals - but use some critical thought here. We can tell when we've upped our risk significantly. And some doc that talks for 5 min sure doesn't really have much vested interest.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#12

Post by throwanem »

hudibras wrote: post #3

The headline on that magazine cover is pretty evil: "Kris Kristofferson's Miracle Recovery from Alzheimer's Diagnosis"

It's a supermarket tabloid, albeit of the glossier, narrower sort. Like any parasite that relies on host interest to achieve reproductive success, being covered in evil lies is literally its one job.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#13

Post by papln »

bin0 wrote: post #8
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests. Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.

If you've got a case bad enough to cause mysterious problems, it's a very bad idea to "just nuke it". Firstly, die-off reactions are a concern. Secondly, the treatment can be very serious (i.v. antibiotics in many cases). Thirdly, antibiotics are not really healthy , though not horribly. However, with the growing body of research surrounding the issue of gut health and its impacts, I'm not sure I'd want to take antib…

"die-off" seems plausible, but why are all the web-search results for "die-off" showing minor blogs and snake-oil stores, and none of the big medical sites like mayo, webmd, healthline, or mainstream news sites?

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#14

Post by nickysielicki »

If you live in the Northeast or Midwest, unless you spend zero time in the woods (and you shouldn't, because the woods are great), you will get a deer tick on you at some point, and it might carry lyme.

My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks. The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick correctly (do not crush his body), then crush a pill and make a paste, which you should apply topically.

If you wait to see a rash, you've waited too long. If you wait until you feel sick a few weeks later, you've waited too long. There are studies that report the rash appears only about half the time, and the blood tests are inaccurate for the first month or so after exposure.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#15

Post by nate_meurer »

nickysielicki wrote: post #14

If you live in the Northeast or Midwest, unless you spend zero time in the woods (and you shouldn't, because the woods are great), you will get a deer tick on you at some point, and it might carry lyme. My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks. The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick co…

At least one study [1] finds topical doxycycline to be useless for prophylactic treatment of lyme. Do you have any evidence supporting its use?

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910720/

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#16

Post by oblongx »

nate_meurer wrote: post #15
nickysielicki wrote: post #14

If you live in the Northeast or Midwest, unless you spend zero time in the woods (and you shouldn't, because the woods are great), you will get a deer tick on you at some point, and it might carry lyme. My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks. The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick co…

At least one study [1] finds topical doxycycline to be useless for prophylactic treatment of lyme. Do you have any evidence supporting its use? 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910720/

I know my infectious disease doctor told me to take a one day oral dose as a prophylactic treatment after you pull off the tick.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#17

Post by nate_meurer »

oblongx wrote: post #16
nate_meurer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one study [1] finds topical doxycycline to be useless for prophylactic treatment of lyme. Do you have any evidence supporting its use? 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910720/

I know my infectious disease doctor told me to take a one day oral dose as a prophylactic treatment after you pull off the tick.

That has nothing to do with its topical application. Drugs that perform well via one route are often ineffective via the other. According to the study I linked, that appears to be case here.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#18

Post by A4B7h »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #4
Arete314159 wrote: post #2

Back before antibiotics, they used to call syphilis "The Great Imitator." The disease, caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria known as a spirochete, could cause so many different kinds of problems it seemed like 10 diseases in one. Genetically, Lyme Disease is very close to syphilis. It's also a spirochete, and it is the new "Great Imitator." (1) The main difficult thing about Lyme Disease is that the tests for it curren…

> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests. Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.

This is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

1) There are different strains of Lyme disease (and other tick-borne diseases) and certain antibiotics are more effective than others.

2) Using antibiotics where it turns out they might not be needed only contributes to growing antibiotic ineffectiveness.

Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)

#20

Post by gambler »

caraffle wrote: post #10
gambler wrote: post #5

It's scary how hard it is to get quality diagnosis and how stubborn the medical establishment is in maintaining the current status quo. We have treatments for many diseases. We know the symptoms. But because your physician might not know about something, you might need to pinball between specialists (losing time and money) or even not properly get diagnosed at all. A free web-based expert system for medical diagnosti…

Of course we have treatments and symptoms for many diseases. But many diseases present the same way. In fact many symptoms are a result of immune response, so naturally they are going to be difficult to differentiate. It's not because the physician doesn't know something. Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person. Overtreatm…

>Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person.

I'm talking about an expert system. You enter symptoms. It asks you questions. Then it says something "there a high probability you have X and medium probability you have Y".

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