Chronic Lyme Disease: Long-term Antibiotics to Be Reconsidered
Chronic Lyme disease -- is there such a thing? If there is, how should it be treated? Those are two questions at the center of a battle. The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) recommends against long-term antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease. A small group of physicians and their patients endorse long-term treatment with antibiotics despite medical evidence that opposes it, according to IDSA.
The IDSA has entered into an agreement with the Attorney General of Connecticut ending his investigation of the Society’s 2006 Lyme disease guidelines. Under the agreement, the guidelines remain in effect but will undergo a one-time special review by an expert panel of doctors and scientists. Doctors who wrote IDSA’s 2006 guidelines concluded that, for nearly all patients, a short course of antibiotics is an effective treatment for Lyme disease. Some studies have concluded that long-term antibiotic treatment is ineffective, expensive, and potentially harmful. The overuse of antibiotics can cause drug-resistant infections that are difficult or even impossible to treat. IDSA claims that it has never been proven that chronic Lyme disease is a real condition -- patients may have something else instead. Advocates for chronic Lyme disease say IDSA's guidelines discourage proper treatment.
Lyme disease (often misspelled as Lime disease) is the most common tick-borne disorder in the United States. Lyme disease is an infectious disease caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacterium classified as a spirochete. Borrelia burgdorferi thrives inside of certain ticks and can be spread to humans by the bite of an infected tick. Adult ticks are about the size of sesame seeds. Nymphal ticks can be the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
There are three stages of Lyme disease: early localized stage, early disseminated stage, and late stage (chronic). Late stage infection (months or years after onset) can lead to chronic arthritis or nervous system involvement. Reducing exposure to infected ticks is your best defense against contracting Lyme disease. Take extra precautions May through July when ticks that transmit Lyme disease are most active.
More Related Resources:
- What Is Chronic Lyme Disease?
- Fast Facts About Lyme Disease
- Test Your Knowledge: Lyme Disease
- How to Protect Yourself Against Lyme Disease
Photos © A.D.A.M. / CDC; Jim Gathany / CDC
Comments
You seem very sympathetic to the IDSA gang, as you don’t note the REASONS for the settlement, including CT Attorney General Blumenthal’s findings re IDSA’s “undisclosed financial interests.”
And that the IDSA “improperly ignored or minimized … alternative … evidence.” They blocked or removed dissenting panelists.
And that the IDSA falsely presented other guidelines as corroborative, when in fact the two panels shared most of their authors, and worked together.
Those “Financial interests” relate to insurance companies, and to Glaxo/SKB money behind Lyme vaccine efforts. A vaccine’s success would require that Lyme be easy to detect and treat, and that it doesn’t persist. Coincidental that these are the points where the IDSA is lined up against the evidence-based physicians?
The panel’s chairman, in particular, runs a lab that’s received millions in funding for vaccine work. The AG found he “held a bias [and] handpicked a likeminded panel without scrutiny…”
As for your comments on long-term antibiotic treatment:
You say: “A small group of physicians…”
Actually, in a recent survey MOST PHYSICIANS were found to treat Lyme with multiple months of antibiotics. The IDSA is in the minority.
You also quote the IDSA: “despite medical evidence”
Actually, there’s no evidence that the IDSA’s one-month treatment works, but lots of evidence that chronic Lyme does exist, with microbiological explanations as to why.
Check out www.ILADS.org and see “Chronic Lyme: An Evidence-Based Review.”
Chronic Lyme is a fact, well-evidenced by many studies cited in that review. None have been cited by the IDSA to refute Chronic Lyme.
Also see the “treatment guidelines” at ILADS. Those are now the ONLY LYME GUIDELINES available and registered, that are not associated with conflicted doctors with dubious reputations.
I do hope you will revise your article to reflect the evidence available. I would be happy to connect you with researchers and materials to help with that effort.
Thank you for your article about Lyme disease. However, it is deceiving to state that a “small group of physicians and their patients endorse long-term treatment.” There are many hundreds of physicians who are well aware that the IDSA guidelines are simply not working.
According to Dr. Raphael Stricker, who treats patients with Lyme, one of the problems “is that the guidelines of the IDSA are extremely narrow and restrict the diagnosis to a very narrow group of patients and exclude the vast majority of patients who have a more chronic form of the disease.”
As Dr. Stricker and other physicians have said, there is strong evidence that Lyme patients treated with long-term antibiotics get better. The IDSA allows for up to three years of antibiotic treatment for other serious illnesses such as TB and leprosy.
Lyme disease is trivialized by the IDSA and believed to be fully cured by their recommended guidelines. However, scores of physicians who treat Lyme patients know that their “cookbook” approach to treatment, unfortunately, may only work for only a handful of people.
Ginger Savely, RN, FNP, who treats patients with Lyme and other tick borne diseases says she knows that the IDSA’s approach to treatment doesn’t work. Instead, she sees that after one month of doxycycline many Lyme patients “are in worse shape than they ever were before they ever started treatment.”
These quotes are taken from interviews I conducted in April, 2008, with Dr. Stricker and Ginger Savely for a special series of interviews with Lyme expert physicians. Please see http://www.lyme-disease-research-database.com
Again, thank you for your article, and for increasing awareness about this growing endemic, which many physicians seem ill-prepared to treat.
Two books out this year - 2008- “Cure Unknown - Inside the Lyme epidemic” by Pamela Weintraub and Beating Lyme” by Constance Bean will give you a better idea of the political/profitable views of the narrow thinking ISDA. Thank God there are many wonderful doctors all over this country who refuse to go by that narrow definition and have continued to research and study Lyme AND have the courage to treat patients. They are the heroes of this new Lyme epidemic - 5X the number of Aids patients in the U.S.
Many of us don’t know we have Lyme until we become very ill. And even then we are misdiagnosed because so little is known - thanks to the self-serving, egocentric doctors, insurance companies, and researchers connected to the ISDA. They should be ashamed. After much investigation on the internet, I diagnosed myself after being told that I had a very rare autoimmune disease (it didn’t sound right to me and, in fact, I did not) and found a Lyme-literate doctor and am now being treated after having this for at least 5 years.
Please pass this information on. There are thousands of patients who think they have other diseases and really have Lyme. We have got to educate our doctors to recognize this debilitating disease. Going by the definition of the ISDA and the CDC will not do it. The guidelines of the wonderful organization, ILADS, International Lyme and Associated DIseases Society, paint a much more realistic, picture of Lyme disease and it’s cure.
Thanks for passing this along. As we get the word out, more people will be treated with long-term antibiotics and recover - until one of these great truth-seeking doctors finds a quick cure or a vaccine that works.
I wish I found my way to an IDSA doctor sooner, and not an ILADS doctor. The cure was worse than the disease; my body is completely wrecked, and I’m on the verge of death, due to overgrowth of bad, resistant germs. I kept saying, “I never feel better; I feel worse,” but that made no difference to the ILADS doctor (who insisted I needed this protocol to get well). After I said, “no more”, I got bitten by a brown recluse spider (in my house; saw the spider). He kept trying to convince me it was a tick bite and put me on the same ol’ antibiotics until the insurance company, thankfully, cut me off. I wish I had that insurance company in the beginning. I am 41 and dying because of this fiasco. There are emergent, drug-resistant bacteria, yet some still prescribe these drugs indiscriminately.
“…He kept trying to convince me it was a tick bite and put me on the same ol’ antibiotics until the insurance company, thankfully, cut me off.”
This reaks, badly. Some doc you have there… it might have had a sliver of a chance [believable story] until that part about the insurance company saving you by cutting off your medicine. Wow.