.) Stress can be the cause of remaining physical symptoms after being bitten by ticks;
c.) Secondary gain (patient has hidden motive for wanting to remain ill);
d.) Prior undiagnosed psychiatric disorders (some from as far back as childhood) that don’t appear in individuals until after they have a tick bite;
e.) Even while living in endemic areas, having a tick bite, EM rash, positive lab work and showing improvement on antibiotic therapy- many of the IDSA supporters claim, without examining patients, that they never actually had Lyme disease in the first place so they can’t possibly have chronic Lyme disease;
f.) They feel patients experience improvement due to the placebo effect, so those with continuing symptoms are just easily influenced into believing they are still sick when they aren’t;
g.) If tests don’t support the IDSA’s position, they are being labeled as producing too many false-positives by the IDSA and therefore, the Lyme symptoms remaining must be discounted because the lab tests are inaccurate and the patient can’t have Lyme disease;
h.) Patients that are well-documented, even those house-bound or in the hospital, must have had another tick bite at some point that is causing the continuing symptoms;
i.) A pre-infection emotional state that was never detected or diagnosed is suddenly discovered after getting Lyme disease;
j.) The “no one else had these symptoms before you did, so you can’t have Lyme” theory;
k.) IDSA feels other doctors are not as versed as they happen to be and are part of the problem because they are telling patients they have Lyme disease and they treat them for it when they don’t actually have it;
l.) Patients often decide on their own they have chronic Lyme disease because they don’t like the stigma attached to having unexplained chronic symptoms after having a tick bite and contracting Lyme disease;
m.) There is not enough research being done on how to explain to patients that they aren’t suffering from Lyme (when they really are) and more research ($$) is needed by the IDSA so they can figure out how to explain that to patients so they believe what they are being told;
n.) Patients have symptoms but they aren’t the same symptoms the IDSA authors have listed in their Guidelines, so it can’t be Lyme disease;
o.) You are a female or you are getting older and the symptoms you have just became noticeable to you since you got Lyme disease;
p.) Your symptoms aren’t bad enough to be Lyme disease, or the opposite, the symptoms are too severe to be Lyme disease;
q.) People in the general population can have those symptoms, so they can’t be Lyme related;
r.) Doctors treating children in endemic areas don’t know the difference between mosquito bites and tick bites and falsely label patients who are experiencing Lyme symptoms with having Lyme;
s.) Anxiety about the illness, derived from reading information on the Internet, causes patients to remain ill and think they have chronic Lyme disease;
t.) The authoritative “you are not sick because I said so” theory;
u.) Patients develop an unexplained personality disorder, or fibromyalgia, or depression, but only after having a bite from a tick infected with Lyme disease, so it is a coincidence and is unrelated.  |