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New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

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Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#151

Post by e40 »

fdudjnr wrote: post #102

I had a tick bite years about with bullseye and didn’t get treated. I’ve had Lyme disease-related symptoms ever since, but and assume from what I’ve read it’s too late to do anything about it. Would this treatment still help or am I still fucked?

It is purely anecdotal but I read a post here years ago about someone that had a 10 year battle with Lyme disease, had gone through rounds of antibiotics and it always came back. He finally heard that maybe long fasts (2 weeks) might help, tried it and his symptoms went away. Just mentioning it because it seems relevant. I always thought should it happen to me, I would give a 2 week fast a try, under a doctor's supervision.

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#152

Post by e40 »

netaustin wrote: post #21

I contracted Lyme disease while on vacation in Cape Cod last year. The first symptom was left-side facial paralysis, which my physician diagnosed as Bell's Palsy, so I spent two weeks on steroids before we figured out the real issue. Three weeks of doxycycline cured the Lyme but left feeling pretty wrecked for more than a month afterwards! I seem to have avoided the chronic symptoms some people experience, but a low-…

I had a co-worker that had a Bell's Palsy diagnosis and it turned out to be Lyme disease. Don't know which antibiotic they took, but he did get clear of it in a few months.

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#153

Post by James_bread »

I found this break down helpful from the study: https://danielcameronmd.com/could-piperacillin-be-the-lyme-d...

1. The Study Was in Mice, Not Humans 2. Mice Don’t Develop Chronic Symptoms 3. No Co-Infections 4. IV-Only Formulation

Another promising and more tested treatment is that of doctor Richard I. Horowitz: https://sciprofiles.com/publication/view/834d15f5acf0268c9bc...

I have been suffering from Lyme disease for over 15 years but I just discovered it was Lyme 2 years ago. I had a negative test first but did not trust it and did a test at a specialised lab in Germany and that came back positive. From what I hear is that the normal antibodies test only works for 50%.

Suffering from Lyme is brutal, and you look fine from the outside so it's hard for others to relate too, it attacks your whole system and if it's in your brain and nerve system it can make you feel heavily depressed and anxious like you have PTSD, this makes social events feel like a warzone.

For a period of time I could bairly talk, I just could not find the words anymore. If friends or family of my get a tick bit I always suggest them to get antibotics even if you did not have a bullseye, better safe than sorry and the risk is of getting it is way greater than what the antibiotics will do to your body.

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#154

Post by soulofmischief »

jerlam wrote: post #146
soulofmischief wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally used to get laughed out of the clinic, told I was a healthy young male and just needed to exercise more. After a decade of this, I was finally diagnosed with gout, something doctors had just been lying about testing for. No one could believe someone could have gout in their 20s (It's been developing since my late teens and I've generally had arthritis my entire life, since I was a child). It took a physic…

I wonder if the medical textbooks only mention gout as a historical curiosity and not as a modern day disease. I have an older relative with gout, have met someone in their 30s with gout, and yesterday heard a story about an acquaintance with gout, so it's not that rare anymore.

I think it's just typically seen in older men. In fact, only something like 5% of gout sufferers are women. But a 2023 study says [0]:

> The global gout prevalent cases in individuals aged 15–39 years was 5.21 million in 2019, with the annual incidence substantially increasing from 38.71 to 45.94 per 100 000 population during 1990–2019

So while marginal, it is either getting more prevalent for younger men over the last 30 years, or we are getting better at catching it.

What's interesting is all of the older men I've met with gout describe moderately uncomfortable pains, I was surprised to learn that my case is exceptionally intense, debilitating enough to be a physical handicap at times (along with sciatica, fused discs, flat feet, some other little things and possible fibromyalgia) which has plagued my life since I was in my teens.

It's been a horrendous disease that has greatly impacted my ability to be as active as I'd like, and sometimes during a flare-up it's extremely difficult just to walk to my bathroom. Flare ups sometimes happen constantly and sometimes I get a month or two of reduced symptoms.

Another thing is that I don't eat meat, and I rarely drink, which are the two biggest aggravators of symptoms. When the doc told me I needed to cut those things out I laughed, and they said they were very surprised that my symptoms were so bad given that I already avoid the most offensive foods.

I'm also currently trying to pin down another autoimmune disease. From what I know, I don't speak to him, but my father has been in and out of the hospital his whole life and it took decades to pin it down as lupus. I am wondering if he lacked the butterfly rash because I don't have one, but otherwise have basically every symptom of lupus, but it also could be fibromyalgia or even MS. Combined with the gout though, I feel 40 years older than I am, almost every little tissue and bone and muscle hurts from head to toe (literally toe, gout keeps one of my toes at a constant level of pain).

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152042/

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#155

Post by seattle_spring »

diamondfist25 wrote: post #136
seattle_spring wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Isn't the best place to open a center that "researches tick based disease transmission" somewhere that's close proximity to a hot-spot for ticks that transmit diseases?

Hmm reminds me of the lab in Wuhan’s that’s doing weapons level bio research, and yet the virus came from a wet market

Yes, very similar situation. Opening a Coronavirus research lab next to an area historically active for natural virus harbors and transmission makes perfect sense. However, that situation also empowered the uninformed to come out of the woodwork and repeat the nonsense they heard from people like Bret Weinstein, using the correlation with a perfectly reasonable explanation as some kind of "gotcha".

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#156

Post by seattle_spring »

diamondfist25 wrote: post #129
voidmain0001 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason you refer to alternative medical communities in response to my comment? Considering I made no reference to using alternative medicine, what does it have to do with my comment? Do you have an agenda? I know that I don't have one and neither did my comment.

This is the bias that people have They only trust the small sample of evidence that science provides, and dismisses the vastly unknown space that their science cannot comprehend

"Science" is simply a structured methodology that uses tangible evidence to substantiate hypothesis. How exactly would that framework be unable to "comprehend" something like Lyme?

This quote seems apt here: "You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine."

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#158

Post by spondylosaurus »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
bentt wrote: post #13

This is amazing and really needed in the northern US and Canada. It is also great they speak to the chronic lyme condition because many people get accused of it being psychosomatic or even false (similar with long Covid). Their theory of it being bacterial remnants in the liver is validating.

> It is also great they speak to the chronic lyme condition because many people get accused of it being psychosomatic or even false (similar with long Covid). I have a friend who worked in research for rare, chronic, and misunderstood diseases for a few years. Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS or just PTLD) is well accept by now. The problem they encountered was that so many of the people who presented with…

I tested positive for Lyme once because it was one of those "first line" inaccurate tests that can get thrown off by the presence of unrelated inflammation. I knew it was a false positive because I'd never stepped foot in territory with Lyme-carrying ticks, but a doctor insisted on testing me anyway, and then the false positive sent me to an infectious disease specialist who did a more reliable test and concluded that the first one was wrong.

Had I been less skeptical, it would've been very easy to conclude that I had "chronic Lyme". Thankfully I knew better than to take the first test at face value and kept pushing for answers to find out what was behind the results-warping inflammation. But there have to be too many people out there with very real symptoms and problems who are misled into clinging to bullshit answers.

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#159

Post by junto »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #55
netaustin wrote: post #21

I contracted Lyme disease while on vacation in Cape Cod last year. The first symptom was left-side facial paralysis, which my physician diagnosed as Bell's Palsy, so I spent two weeks on steroids before we figured out the real issue. Three weeks of doxycycline cured the Lyme but left feeling pretty wrecked for more than a month afterwards! I seem to have avoided the chronic symptoms some people experience, but a low-…

Doxycycline is my favorite antibiotic and the most effective against chronic sinusitis and chronic prostatitis for me. I only take it maybe once a year, but it does wonders for a good long time. It also cured my nearly lifelong IBS-D about a decade ago. I had a small re-occurrence of IBS-D last year after so many years without it. I was able to convince the doc that it fixed it for me in the past, so he prescribed me…

Doxy turned my IBD into UC. Horrible disease that vastly increases your chances of bowel cancer. Wiping out your gut bacteria richness should not be done lightly.

Re: New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms

#160

Post by just6979 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #135
fma wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American doctors are also reluctant to do rabies shot. Yeah they are expensive, the risk is low and there are ways to rule it out, but I'd rather not die. Other countries can get them anywhere for cheap. Here...thousands of dollars in the ER. One reason could be its just not administered enough. The other is, for profit American medical system because no one wants to die.

"Other countries can get them anywhere for cheap." Those of us outside the US understand the US health care system is more profit orientated than many other countries but we cannot understand the huge price differentials, they're often huge in comparison with many others. Surely figures that high are nothing other than price-gouging. (Even if demand is low and the stuff has to be imported the additional costs can't b…

Because the US has absolute garbage enforcement of consumer safety and anti-monopoly laws, and those laws aren't exactly strong or clear to begin with.

Health-care industry lobbyists spend huge sums to convince lawmakers that they're not price-gouging and _any_ kind of price control is somehow illegal and/or will destroy the economy. This allows them to keep prices high, colluding with health insurances to make deals that incentivize buy insurance (direct-to-patient prices for many medical things are much higher than the prices that the insurance companies pay). Prices high enoguh to make it worth spending so much on lobbying.

It's completely backwards and very anti-consumer/anti-patient, but money has such an outsized influence on our politics, it's ridiculously difficult to get changes made that actually benefit the average citizen.

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