Hi,

I was wondering if any of you have had experience with Lyme Disease?

Next.... a lot of it goes undiagnosed. You can have tingling in your fingers, arms, stiff neck, Arthritis type symptoms. One moment you can be fine, and the next week it can disable you.

And.. I don't claim to be an expert, but there seems to be a lot of conflicting information on lyme disease even among physicians on how to treat it. Some are claiming as many as 1/2 of the cases don't detect it. And most agree there are at least 10X as many cases that are reported.

Everyone please be careful with ticks. Some are suggesting even mosquitoes can transfer it.

Please read up on this, if you catch it early, it can save you from disability.

This warning should be for the medical side of things, proper diagnoses is paramount.

Patrice is a wealth of info. You need to find a dr that specializes in lymes (ILADS) for proper diagnosis

Strange that you posted that...
I've been pulling ticks off my coyote pelts in the fur shed. Pretty common here...

9 years of Lyme here. Yep it sucks. And you HAVE to be your own advocate Cause the doctors suck on treatment and diagnosis of lyme

Caught mine early like within 3 days of finding the tick on me in the dead of winter. Started feeling super weird. I was very fortunate. Nothing to play with for sure.

The two of you that have lyme disease, did the test indicate you had it?

My first Lymes test was negative but I kept getting sicker. My Doc finally diagnosed it as Ehrlichiosis, another of those lucky-for-us tick-borne diseases. Twice since then I have gotten sick, negative for Lymes, but my Doc treated me anyway.

I think the percentage is that 60% of Lymes tests are a false negative, which means you can have it, but the tests will not indicate aggressive treatment. Unless you have a Doc that is willing to treat it aggressively it can have some very serious, lasting effects. Take it seriously.

Moosetrot

From what I understand year's don't always come up positive so just because your Dr says your good doesn't necessarily mean you are. Don't be afraid to get a second test or opinion. Lyme's symptoms can also be confused with MS and many times you can be misdiagnosed. Michiagn Trapper is right and stay on it till you feel confident about your results.

M, 2, that is what I have heard also. Thank you for your comments. I just didn't want to act like an idiot in front of the Dr. I have went from Benching 375+ to now I can't even pick my foot up over a curb. And a contributing factor is Im a guy, and have Dr Phobia, so unless I'm dieing, I won't go to a Dr. LOL

My situation I feel was very fortunate. My mother was working at a local doctors office at the time. All the ticks I have pulled off of me she always said I would be the one to get it. The tick in the dead of winter was strange and when I went down we knew it had to be tick related. I was a young healthy buck just out of high school, working, and trapping when I became ill.

My first symptoms were loss of appetite which was very very unusual for me as I eat like a horse. Had no desire to eat when I first started feeling bad. Laid down because I felt suddenly exhausted one morning after checking my line and slept like 8 hours at my grandparents house. Barely made it on the one hour drive back home. Got home slept another14 hours straight. Still didn't want to eat.

This was all of a sudden in one day. We knew something was wrong......O yea I pulled that attached tick from my private area the other day in the shower "light bulb goes off". A December tick at that, must have been fresh off a host.

Went in the next day to doctors office to have blood work done. Told doctor to check for tick related illness. All I know he said something about the "Titer" in the blood work was positive for a certain bacteria related to Lyme Disease. I did go to a "specialists" but not much help either, pretty much told me the same thing. We treated it aggressively with Doxy and Tetracycline for like 3 months. Those antibiotics made me feel horrible.

I was told I would always have Lyme for the rest of my life. Apparently i never really goes away, but no effects since treatment. This was 10 years ago so I am sure research has developed a good bit since. Seems there is more and more confirmed cases now days. From reading other peoples experiences with Lyme and its debilitating side effects I really danced with the devil and came out on top thanks to the good lord.

My wife has had it twice, and I know several people who have been seriously debilitated by it and two people who have died from complications related to Lyme disease so yeah. Don't take chances.

ttt

Symptoms can also be seen as a whole variety of different illnesses like MS, fibromyalgia to name a couple. I have a symptom checklist but don't know how to post a pdf. I still think I might have lymes even though several drs have done the 2 common tests (elisa and western blot) which give a false negative about 70% of the time, and the percentage of false negative increases as time goes on.

Hey, SkunkQuill. You will want to go back and read some of our previous Lyme threads. Here is one:
https://trapperman.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/6395102/re-lymes-disease-help#Post6341689

There are more good ones, but that was the most recent. Good luck!
Patrice

30 days of doxycycline, if it mashed you feel way better. Bet you got Lyme


Then it's time to get serious about finding a Lyme literate doctor Or search out other alternative treatments


Banderol has done wonders for me. As far as muscle joint and brain fog

Unfortunately I've had awful digestive system issues since September

If you can't get rid of it Plan on making a lot of lifestyle changes and expect a lot of people to not understand your illness

Get a hold of the Lyme disease association. Lots of REAL info not a bunch of B.S.

Thank you for that link. It seems there are a lot more people out there with this potentially than is acknowledged.

One interesting thing I ran across, and that was hyperbaric chamber treatment for Lyme. As with many things, you have to be cautious and skeptical on what others tell you, but I tend to do a lot of research on stuff I'm interested in, and I'm fairly pragmatic. I talked to a Physician in Texas who had his own Hyperbaric chamber for sale, and he said he had Lyme disease and could not even work anymore. After receiving Hyperbaric Treatment, along with other medicines I assume, he said he was able to go back to work.

I believe you need an oxygen level of 2.0 ata or higher, but don't take this as gospel. the portable ones only go to about 1.3 ata. They claim at 2.0 ata various things can't survive a pure oxygen state. I ran across 2 or 3 people who had stories to tell me about remarkable treatments with HBOt (hyperbaric oxygen therapy). And they were not trying to sell me anything, so I felt they were telling the truth.

There is a fairly famous Lyme Dr in Hermitage PA. I am sure I will be experimenting with the above method, and I have an appointment to s ee the physician in PA. Soooo I'll see how this goes.

I read on one page, the standard tests are so innacurate possibly because the people they do the medical trials on, have already been diagnosed with Lyme Disease.

It's amazing there is so much disagreement in the medical community over this.

I also read, a lot of cases from lyme disease come from the baby ticks, they are so small, they are very hard to detect. 2mm on average Some even believe its possible to get it from mosquitoes

And while were at it... bored??? Here is another scary subject! BEDBUGS




Now that I think about it.. maybe this lyme disease is causing me to act strange, people ask me why I am always in this costume

SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

●The diagnosis of early Lyme disease can be made solely on clinical grounds if the characteristic erythema migrans (EM) lesion is present in a patient who lives in or has recently traveled to an area that is endemic for Lyme disease (picture 1 and picture 2). The patient with a characteristic EM lesion will likely be seronegative, since the lesion appears prior to development of a diagnostic, adaptive immune response. Laboratory testing is neither required nor recommended. (See 'Approach to diagnosis' above.)


●In contrast to the negative serology at the time of the appearance of the EM lesion, by the time the patient has findings of early disseminated extracutaneous disease (eg, lymphocytic meningitis, facial palsy, radiculoneuropathy, carditis with heart block), serologic tests are typically positive, as they are in patients with late Lyme disease. (See 'Approach to diagnosis' above.)


●Serologic testing should be performed in patients who meet ALL of the following criteria:


•A recent history of having resided in or traveled to an area endemic for Lyme disease


and


•A risk factor for exposure to ticks


and


•Symptoms consistent with early disseminated disease or late Lyme disease (eg, meningitis, radiculopathy, mononeuritis, cranial nerve palsy, arthritis, carditis) (see 'Indications for serologic testing' above)


●Serologic testing for Lyme disease should NOT be performed in the following settings:


•In patients with an EM rash. Patients with skin rashes consistent with EM who reside in or have recently traveled to an endemic area should be treated for Lyme disease. (See "Clinical manifestations of Lyme disease in adults", section on 'Erythema migrans' and "Lyme disease: Clinical manifestations in children", section on 'Erythema migrans' and "Treatment of Lyme disease", section on 'Early disease'.)


•For screening of asymptomatic patients living in endemic areas


•For patients with non-specific symptoms only (eg, fatigue, myalgias/arthralgias). The use of serologic testing in populations with a low pre-test probability of Lyme disease results in a greater likelihood of false-positive test results than true positive test results. (See 'Indications for serologic testing' above.)


●A skin lesion similar to EM can be seen in Southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI); however, the geographic distribution of Lyme disease and STARI are usually different (exceptions are Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey). (See 'Distinction from STARI' above.)


●When serologic testing is indicated, two-tier testing is recommended. The traditional approach uses an whole cell-based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) followed by a Western blot as the tests of choice. However, Western blot testing can be difficult to perform and interpret; thus, alternative algorithms that eliminate the need for Western blot testing are being tested (See 'Serologic testing' above.)


●Routine follow-up serologic testing is not recommended in assessing the patient who is cured or slowly improving. (See 'Persistence of antibodies' above.)


●The diagnosis of neurologic Lyme disease and Lyme arthritis are discussed separately. (See "Nervous system Lyme disease", section on 'Diagnosis' and "Musculoskeletal manifestations of Lyme disease", section on 'Laboratory testing'.)


●Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing of specimens of CSF or synovial fluid for Borrelia burgdorferi DNA in a reliable laboratory can add confirmatory information in seropositive patients. However, a positive PCR result by itself is likely to be a false-positive result, and a positive result does not prove that the patient has active infection, since spirochetal DNA may persist long after spirochetal killing has occurred. (See 'Polymerase chain reaction' above.)


●Use of laboratory tests other than those described above (ELISA, Western blot, and in limited cases, PCR), to support a diagnosis of Lyme disease is not recommended. (See 'Special considerations' above.)

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