Our dog picked one up in the middle of the city last week.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America in an official statement referred to patients who claim to have chronic lyme disease as simply dealing with the "aches and pains of everyday living."

Thanks, IDSA!

Thank God there's an international movement to raise awareness and promote research and better treatment for this disease, which several European researchers believe is actually the cause of MS. Tests of MS patients vs. controls have found rates of Lyme infection from 70 to 100% (the 100% was using the very latest technologies.) Research from the 20s and 30s was already onto the bacterial theory of MS etiology, but it's gotten squashed. Odd, because late Lyme and MS are indistinguishable on MRI and are symptomatically very similar.

But antibiotic treatment for MS would put make a huge dent in pharma profits, and we wouldn't want that. . .

...who IS blaming congestive heart failure, edema, pain from gallstones, completely arthritic hip joints and being 80 years old and the accompanying issues on Lyme disease, which he doesn't have, and never has had, even though he had years or antibiotic treatment from quacks, while refusing all medical advice and treatment for what he DOES have....

you wouldn't be so quick to scoff about the Lyme disease hype. It's a very common ploy to avoid dealing with one's real medical conditions among the mentally not-all-there, who believe that a pill will eliminate the need for surgery, lifestyle changes, and exercise.

suffering from the extremes of IDSA. If they weren't so extreme, then people who actually need more than three weeks of doxy could get help without being left to doctors who either have to operate beneath the radar OR the fringe MDs and other practitioners to whom seropositive symptomatic people go when the medical establishment doesn't believe them.

ME/CFIDS now has clinical proof as well, at least in terms of post-exertional fatigue, but was dismissed for years as an excuse for not working or hypochondria.

This sort of thing makes it soooo much worse. It's no wonder people will ask for an MS diagnosis for identical symptoms, because then suddenly they get insurance coverage and are believed by friends, coworkers and relatives rather than having their spirit further eroded while suffering physically.

If there were more funding for evidence-based research, folks like your Dad would no more be able to claim this than they could any other disease.

(and I'm talking in the City of Ann Arbor proper) I'm not surprised. It's not like we are going to be running the deer through a dip for ticks, either.

That's okay, another year of Governor Snyder, and we'll be harvesting all that deer to stay alive...