3 ms·
Researchers have done autopsies on Lyme patients who have been treated with antibiotics multiple times, and they have still found in some cases that the bodies
by Arete314159 5y ago
Researchers have done autopsies on Lyme patients who have been treated with antibiotics multiple times, and they have still found in some cases that the bodies of the deceased had active, post-antibiotic infection.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.628045/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...
There are also some new treatments on the horizon such as dapsone (the antibiotic used for leprosy) and disulfiram, that appear to be giving chronically ill post-treatment lyme patients new relief. This would imply that the antibiotic treatments used before were simply not the right ones to knock out persistent infection.
To my mind, the biggest issue with post-treatment lyme is that the current medical model is wrong and outdated. We think of Lyme as like strep throat - cured with a short course of antibiotics - when we should be thinking of it like TB and Leprosy. TB patients have to take a long, grueling course of antibiotics, and even so sometimes TB can be isolated from bone marrow after treatment.
The variable nature of the disease coupled with the fact that some people do indeed improve with short courses leads medicine to make lazy generalizations that leave out about 20% of the population's disease experience.
My hope is that Covid will help us to learn about other post-infectious syndromes. Long Covid was initially brushed off, but the tsunami of cases coupled with some patients' improvement after vaccination has changed the general opinion to be "Long Covid does actually exist." I hope that will help sufferers from Long Lyme, Long Epstein-Barr, and so on finally get some validation and perhaps even better treatments.
- cpncrunch 5y agoThe article you posted is talking about Neuroborreliosis, which is a real thing. The problem with 'chronic lyme' is that it covers a lot of different things. You have the people who never had a rash, tested negative on the standard tests, and never had any symptoms consistent with lyme, then test positive with an unvalidated test, do some weird and wacky treatment like HBOT.
- nradov 5y agoLong COVID was never really brushed off by most clinicians or researchers. Post viral syndrome has been recognized and actively researched for decades. It appears that many different viral infections can cause persistent symptoms. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/ The real questions were about incidence, severity, and mechanism. At this point around 36% of Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and so some of those people label any minor symptom they feel as "long COVID" without any evidence of causality.