Chronic Lyme: Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance is real. But coupled with a fear in the medical community that we are teetering on the edge of the next killer pandemic the fear of antibiotic resistance has produced hyper-vigilance. Environmental concerns come from very well thought out studies that documenting the real evolution of bacteria and viruses in environmentally damaged areas of the world. The spread of Malaria is the most troubling. Where clear cutting produced an abundance of a certain mosquito that was rare until the environmental damage was done. You can fight the mosquito war with chemicals but these chemicals create and entirely new environmental disaster. So we end up in a damned if you damned if you don't situation that scares the people charged with caring for victim of epidemics.

I personally know a man who was treated for chronic sinus infections years with antibiotics and steroids. Surgery was not an option for his corrugated sinus structure. After 10 years finally his ENT said to him, "This is your last round of antibiotics, there is nothing left that I can give you. You have take everything on the market." End of the road. He stayed on that last antibiotic for about a year. Each time he tried to get off of it he got sick again. During that time he decided to loose weight and do everything he could to help the process and avoid dying of untreatable infection. It was very hard to be so dedicated to his health when he was so sick but he did it. He was very obese. He lost almost 200 pounds, began to exercise and eat right and suddenly other antibiotics that he had developed a resistance to started working again.

In the throws of an epidemic like malaria you won't have the time to correct an unhealthy lifestyle to make your antibiotics work more effectively. You take the drugs for malaria and then get infected again with a more advance strain of malaria and the cycle repeats itself until you just die. There is nothing that strikes fear in the heart of a doctor quite like a dead patient.

Doxycycline is the front runner for treating Malaria as well as Lyme and many other diseases. Antibiotic resistance to this drug is troubling.

So this is the fear in the heart of your doctor. There is social component too. "What if I treat you with 8 months of antibiotics and we create the next eveloution of the bacteria that is making you sick. What if the new evaloution is more horrible than anything we have seen previously? What if it is a super bug?"

Well this is a lot of "what ifs" that based on fear and real lack of understanding of how antibiotic resistance develops. 8 months of antibiotics will make a person well - 8 years makes a person resistant. A friend of mine was treated repeatedly for 3 years for recurrent urinary tract infection with more advance antibiotics each time she got sick. Finally she was hospitalized and developed MRSA in the hospital. She recovered from MRSA well without the need to try different cycles of antibiotics. She did not develop antibiotic resistance. She was able to recover from a super bug infection. But she was a person dedicated to a healthy lifestyle even when she was sick.

Chronic Lyme treatment is more scary because it usually involves a cocktail of antibiotics required to treat co-infection. Theses cocktails are normally reserved for very advance infections such as MRSA or TB. So that raises a red flag immediately.

Do we as Lyme patients have the responsibility not to create the next new "super Lyme bug"? You bet. It is your responsibility to take the shortest course possible. (Not an ineffective course just the shortest course. For Chronic Lyme that maybe 8 months to 3 years.) Is it your job to live a model lifestyle with healthy habits? Yes. Is it your job not re-expose your blood to the tick population once you receive treatment? Yes.

Should you lay down and die in the interest of not becoming antibiotic resistant. That is just silly.

More serious with Lyme is developing antibiotic resistance due to under-treating. This is what happens when person does stops taking there antibiotics when they feel better. Only to become sick again because they didn't take they full course. Now the patient must take a more advance antibiotic to get over the new infection. Taking 3 weeks of Doxycycline to treat Lyme is also on the same irresponsible path as it only treats one life cycle of Lyme bacteria. You can tell you doctor that you want 9 weeks. But this will only help if you have a brand new infection. For most people they have gone years before finding out that they have Lyme and this will require many months of antibiotics.