Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016)
cbsnews.comIt's scary how hard it is to get quality diagnosis and how stubborn the medical establishment is in maintaining the current status quo. We have treatments for many diseases. We know the symptoms. But because your physician might not know about something, you might need to pinball between specialists (losing time and money) or even not properly get diagnosed at all.
A free web-based expert system for medical diagnostics could save a lot of lives. It's really something that should be tackled by the government (because of liability issue).
Instead, we have shitty scaremongering websites that list similar symptoms for most diseases, don't give any probabilities, don't tell you what tests are available and instead tell you to "contact your physician".
Of course we have treatments and symptoms for many diseases. But many diseases present the same way. In fact many symptoms are a result of immune response, so naturally they are going to be difficult to differentiate. It's not because the physician doesn't know something. Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person.
Overtreatment and overdiagnosis is also a thing. How would you like receiving thousands of dollars of testing every time you visited the doc?
There will be bad docs like in any field but its presumptuous to think most don't know what they're doing.
>Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person.
I'm talking about an expert system. You enter symptoms. It asks you questions. Then it says something "there a high probability you have X and medium probability you have Y".
And a physical exam? Who's going to listen to your lungs and heart, check out your throat, ears, nose, eyes? Those are invaluable in diagnosing even the most common illnesses.
I will mention years ago Kaiser Permanente gave their members this very good book called the Healthwise Handbook. It described many many common conditions, what you could do, and under what conditions to contact your doctor.
They stopped giving it out.
It would be nice to have an expert system to guide you through things. I wouldn't mind if it "paused the dignosis" like:
"It could be A, B or C. Look for <symptom> or try <action> to narrow it down"
Now that I think of it, I have used basically one expert systems in my life. It was the windows diagnosis thing.. "did that fix your problem?" the only thing it fixed was a network problem, once.
> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent."
I can't tell if this is a subtle joke or an egregious editing failure.
It’s an entirely different kind of flying... altogether.
"It’s an entirely different kind of flying"
If you live in the Northeast or Midwest, unless you spend zero time in the woods (and you shouldn't, because the woods are great), you will get a deer tick on you at some point, and it might carry lyme.
My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks. The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick correctly (do not crush his body), then crush a pill and make a paste, which you should apply topically.
If you wait to see a rash, you've waited too long. If you wait until you feel sick a few weeks later, you've waited too long. There are studies that report the rash appears only about half the time, and the blood tests are inaccurate for the first month or so after exposure.
In addition to my other comment, I think a warning is in order for anyone reading the parent comment:
This is a good demonstration of the risk of taking medical advice from random internet strangers. nickysielicki's advice is useless at best, and it can do harm if someone is relying on it to protect them from infection. In particular, if you have the doxycycline tablets, you'd be better off swallowing one rather than trying to make some kind of salve with it. Better yet, do some research and talk to a qualified medical professional about borreliosis prevention.
At least one study [1] finds topical doxycycline to be useless for prophylactic treatment of lyme. Do you have any evidence supporting its use?
I know my infectious disease doctor told me to take a one day oral dose as a prophylactic treatment after you pull off the tick.
That has nothing to do with its topical application. Drugs that perform well via one route are often ineffective via the other. According to the study I linked, that appears to be case here.
Right, pretty sure we agree on that one. I thought I was backing you up, suppose I should have replied to parent comment instead...
My bad, I misread it as a bit of a counterpoint.
Besides the other warnings here, you should also be aware that oral ingestion of doxycycline makes many people photosensitive. So if you were an outdoorsy person in the first place, you may need to change your behavior by staying indoors -- or at least cover up -- if you're taking doxycycline.
Back before antibiotics, they used to call syphilis "The Great Imitator." The disease, caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria known as a spirochete, could cause so many different kinds of problems it seemed like 10 diseases in one.
Genetically, Lyme Disease is very close to syphilis. It's also a spirochete, and it is the new "Great Imitator." (1) The main difficult thing about Lyme Disease is that the tests for it currently are not that good. There are a lot of false positives / negatives, and there is no test that show whether a patient has been cured, only whether they've ever been infected.
Neurological Lyme aka neuroborreliosis can cause a number of neurological / psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms like OCD. Doctors never check for Lyme when a patient presents with sudden onset psych problems, even though it's a known cause.
TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.
(1) interesting side note -- there are some studies that suggest it can also be sexually transmitting and/or transmitted from mother to child
> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.
Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.
If you've got a case bad enough to cause mysterious problems, it's a very bad idea to "just nuke it". Firstly, die-off reactions are a concern. Secondly, the treatment can be very serious (i.v. antibiotics in many cases). Thirdly, antibiotics are not really healthy, though not horribly. However, with the growing body of research surrounding the issue of gut health and its impacts, I'm not sure I'd want to take antibiotics without being sure.
With respect to false positives/negatives, use the igenex test. If you get a good doctor, he'll know how to interpret the results better; you can have high results in certain bands which the CDC does not usually consider relevant but which can still be indicative.
All that aside, no responsible doc "just gives you the drugs". Let's not forget there are a thousand things it could be; just giving the drugs for all would probably kill you. Also, that's how we end up with resistant bacteria.
6 years ago, my wife and I went camping. I ended up over the course getting bit by no less than 15 ticks of various genuses.
I got rocky mountain spotted fever, and was treated for that. It's easy to see cause your body gets spots along with pretty nasty illness. During that course, I was also treated for Lyme as well.
The key here: I was bitten by the primary carriers of lyme and spotted fever, and had one of those diseases. I'm not recommending everybody be given lyme antiparasiticals - but use some critical thought here. We can tell when we've upped our risk significantly. And some doc that talks for 5 min sure doesn't really have much vested interest.
"die-off" seems plausible, but why are all the web-search results for "die-off" showing minor blogs and snake-oil stores, and none of the big medical sites like mayo, webmd, healthline, or mainstream news sites?
This is a bad idea for a number of reasons.
1) There are different strains of Lyme disease (and other tick-borne diseases) and certain antibiotics are more effective than others.
2) Using antibiotics where it turns out they might not be needed only contributes to growing antibiotic ineffectiveness.
The problem is Lyme tests are not conclusive, even when Lyme's is a prime suspect. But yes, I supposed you could always just go for the treatment.
This typo in the article is too coincidental:
> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent."
The headline on that magazine cover is pretty evil: "Kris Kristofferson's Miracle Recovery from Alzheimer's Diagnosis"
It's a supermarket tabloid, albeit of the glossier, narrower sort. Like any parasite that relies on host interest to achieve reproductive success, being covered in evil lies is literally its one job.