3 ms·

And yet, that is sometimes not enough. A good friend showed his obviously infected foot to a doctor who dismissed the circular rash left from a tick as a loca

And yet, that is sometimes not enough. A good friend showed his obviously infected foot to a doctor who dismissed the circular rash left from a tick as a localized infection. Fast forward one year and my friend was having major health issues and difficulty making it through the work day. Eventually, it was the worrisome neuropathy in his arms that motivated him to get a full blood test which revealed... it was Lyme disease after all. And bonus! with a year's worth of disease development, a much harder infection to get rid of.

angelsl 9y ago
It may be worth lodging a complaint with whatever authority your country may have against that doctor that dismissed the bullseye rash.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > It may be worth lodging a complaint with whatever authority your country may have against that doctor that dismissed the bullseye rash. Because Lyme's disease is regional - almost exclusively found in the Northeast and Minnesota/Wisconsin - most doctors won't have had much experience with it. Lyme's disease also presents with a lot of different symptoms that are very difficult to differentiate from other conditions (including other tick-borne diseases), which makes it difficult for doctors in those areas to diagnose. The trademark "bullseye" rash of Lyme looks striking in pictures, but in most cases, it's less heavily pronounced, and it's harder to differentiate from many other possible sources of a rash or irritation. This is actually a problem for people who contract Lyme's disease more than once - after you've had Lyme's once, you will always test positive for the disease, even though you may no longer need treatment, so it's hard to identify patients who have been reinfected.