Re: New Lyme Disease Guidelines Spark Showdown Boy, This really gets my blood boiling!!!
Apparently the CDC also maintains this position.
Instead of recognizing Lyme Disease as a chronic illness (long lasting) and assuming the obligation for additional research, IDSA and the CDC et al are stating.. if it can’t be cured, it does not exsist and now according to Dr. Wormser’s IDSA guidelines.. if symptoms persist longer than 14-28 days it is classified as this pseudo illness Post Lyme Syndrome. What kind of asinine assessment is that!!!!* To the thousands of Lyme sufferers, this is no less than genocide.* God Help Us!!!!
More info concerning the controversy.... Although there is no doubt that Lyme disease exists, and most clinicians agree on the treatment of early Lyme disease, there is considerable controversy as to the prevalence of the disease, the proper procedure for diagnosis and treatment of later stages, and the likelihood of a chronic, antibiotic-resistant Lyme infection. On one side are those who believe that Lyme disease is relatively rare, easily diagnosed with available blood tests, and easily treated with two to four weeks of antibiotics. On the other side are those who believe that Lyme disease is under-diagnosed, that available blood tests are unreliable, and that extended antibiotic treatment is often necessary. The majority of public health agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control maintain the former position, and recommend adherence to the* IDSA guidelines. . While this narrower position is sometimes described as the "mainstream" view of Lyme disease, published studies involving non-randomized surveys of physicians in* areas found physicians evenly split in their views, with the majority recognizing* Lyme disease, and roughly half prescribing
extended courses of antibiotics for chronic Lyme disease.
Concern about false positive . Many physicians with a conservative view of Lyme disease believe it is over-diagnosed and over-treated. One of the most widely cited studies from critics of Lyme Disease was written by Allan Steere. His study, published in JAMA concluded that 57% of patients diagnosed with Chronic Lyme in an endemic area did not actually have the disease. Critics have responded with the following arguments:
45% of those considered "misdiagnosed" in the study received positive results from another laboratory, and negative results from the authors' laboratory.
However there was no independent evaluation, and no reason to assume that the authors' laboratory was superior. In a separate study funded by the NIH, the laboratory used by Allan Steere was sent definite Lyme Disease serology in a blinded fashion in an attempt to discover the reliability of testing at major academic centers. The study concluded that the rate of true positives for this laboratory was significanly less than 100 percenent.
The authors failed to consider the phenomenon of seronegative Lyme disease (false positive). Rather than consider the possibility of persistent infection , the authors considered treatment failure to be evidence of misdiagnosis, i.e. patients could not possibly have Lyme if they were not cured by a standard course of antibiotics even though the authors had previously published that treatment failures were common.
However, despite this fact, the authors concluded that all patients with Lyme respond to treatment - another example of circular reasoning.
The authors excluded patients from a diagnosis of Lyme disease if they had psychiatric symptoms, despite the fact that Lyme can cause such symptoms.
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