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)
#2Back 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 currently are not that good. There are a lot of false positives / negatives, and there is no test that show whether a patient has been cured, only whether they've ever been infected.
Neurological Lyme aka neuroborreliosis can cause a number of neurological / psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms like OCD. Doctors never check for Lyme when a patient presents with sudden onset psych problems, even though it's a known cause.
TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.
(1) interesting side note -- there are some studies that suggest it can also be sexually transmitting and/or transmitted from mother to child
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#3The headline on that magazine cover is pretty evil: "Kris Kristofferson's Miracle Recovery from Alzheimer's Diagnosis"
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#4Back 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.
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#5It'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 diagnostics could save a lot of lives. It's really something that should be tackled by the government (because of liability issue).
Instead, we have shitty scaremongering websites that list similar symptoms for most diseases, don't give any probabilities, don't tell you what tests are available and instead tell you to "contact your physician".
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#6Back 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.
The problem is Lyme tests are not conclusive, even when Lyme's is a prime suspect. But yes, I supposed you could always just go for the treatment.
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#7This typo in the article is too coincidental:
> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent."
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#8Back 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.
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 antibiotics without being sure.
With respect to false positives/negatives, use the igenex test. If you get a good doctor, he'll know how to interpret the results better; you can have high results in certain bands which the CDC does not usually consider relevant but which can still be indicative.
All that aside, no responsible doc "just gives you the drugs". Let's not forget there are a thousand things it could be; just giving the drugs for all would probably kill you. Also, that's how we end up with resistant bacteria.
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#9> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent."
I can't tell if this is a subtle joke or an egregious editing failure.
Re: Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
#10It'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.
Overtreatment and overdiagnosis is also a thing. How would you like receiving thousands of dollars of testing every time you visited the doc?
There will be bad docs like in any field but its presumptuous to think most don't know what they're doing.