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> I was bit by a tick about 2 weeks ago. To get a lyme disease/meningitis test done Why do they even test for it? Don't they just start antibiotic treatment f

> I was bit by a tick about 2 weeks ago. To get a lyme disease/meningitis test done Why do they even test for it? Don't they just start antibiotic treatment for it?

VLM 13y ago
You've just defined the recipe for developing antibiotic resistant "other things". Doxocycline-resistent... donno UTI or STD or gum disease or whatever. That would suck if STDs became resistant, now incurable. To a crude first approximation, a new antibiotic gets a fixed number of uses in the environment before it becomes ineffective in the environment. Its bad medicine to "waste" a valuable use of a fixed supply of an expensive product. You can save 50 million lives of actually sick people, or just provide 50 million placebos. Also most dr. have a huge aversion to making people sick, and there are very few antibiotics indeed (none?) that don't have a measurable chance of killing the user or making them sick. Amoxocilian makes me pretty sick. Doing a course of it "for fun" would be incredibly unwise. Of course if it were "take the amoxocilian and get sick, or the infected leg has to be chopped off" well maybe that's worth some puking and fever. So if your odds of infection are 0.5% but the odds of horrendous digestive system meltdown are 5% and death is a 0.1% likelihood, you're better off getting tested. This is like the old "why not remove everyone's appendix?" question. Because removing everyone's would kill more people than appendicitis currently kills for a net negative.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > So if your odds of infection are 0.5% but the odds of horrendous digestive system meltdown are 5% and death is a 0.1% likelihood, you're better off getting tested. Except when you get bitten by a tick and have stage-1 Lyme disease symptoms like a huge swollen bulls eye, your odds of infection are more like 99.9%. If someone is getting tested for getting bit by a tick, they most likely have some sort of symptoms. > You've just defined the recipe for developing antibiotic resistant "other things". Doxocycline-resistent... donno UTI or STD or gum disease or whatever. That would suck if STDs became resistant, now incurable. I thought that was more likely from the hundreds of millions of pounds of antibiotics used in factory farming, not preventative medicine. When a bunch of us were exposed to a person who 48-hours later came down with severe meningitis (coma), they dosed us all with cow pills of antibiotics. I'm sure they could have waited until we all got 105F fevers by the time the tests came back, but they took the risk of antibiotic resistance and pre-treated us all.

> I was bit by a tick about 2 weeks ago. To get a lyme disease/meningitis test done Why do they even test for it? Don't they just start antibiotic treatment for it?

VLM 13y ago

You've just defined the recipe for developing antibiotic resistant "other things". Doxocycline-resistent... donno UTI or STD or gum disease or whatever. That would suck if STDs became resistant, now incurable. To a crude first approximation, a new antibiotic gets a fixed number of uses in the environment before it becomes ineffective in the environment. Its bad medicine to "waste" a valuable use of a fixed supply of an expensive product. You can save 50 million lives of actually sick people, or just provide 50 million placebos. Also most dr. have a huge aversion to making people sick, and there are very few antibiotics indeed (none?) that don't have a measurable chance of killing the user or making them sick. Amoxocilian makes me pretty sick. Doing a course of it "for fun" would be incredibly unwise. Of course if it were "take the amoxocilian and get sick, or the infected leg has to be chopped off" well maybe that's worth some puking and fever. So if your odds of infection are 0.5% but the odds of horrendous digestive system meltdown are 5% and death is a 0.1% likelihood, you're better off getting tested. This is like the old "why not remove everyone's appendix?" question. Because removing everyone's would kill more people than appendicitis currently kills for a net negative.

darkarmani 13y ago
> So if your odds of infection are 0.5% but the odds of horrendous digestive system meltdown are 5% and death is a 0.1% likelihood, you're better off getting tested. Except when you get bitten by a tick and have stage-1 Lyme disease symptoms like a huge swollen bulls eye, your odds of infection are more like 99.9%. If someone is getting tested for getting bit by a tick, they most likely have some sort of symptoms. > You've just defined the recipe for developing antibiotic resistant "other things". Doxocycline-resistent... donno UTI or STD or gum disease or whatever. That would suck if STDs became resistant, now incurable. I thought that was more likely from the hundreds of millions of pounds of antibiotics used in factory farming, not preventative medicine. When a bunch of us were exposed to a person who 48-hours later came down with severe meningitis (coma), they dosed us all with cow pills of antibiotics. I'm sure they could have waited until we all got 105F fevers by the time the tests came back, but they took the risk of antibiotic resistance and pre-treated us all.