Clongen Tests I did on my Spinal Fluid for Lyme and Other Tick Born Illness

Clongen Labs
http://www.clongen.com/

Test for Ticks Born Illness
http://clongen.com/lyme_disease_testing2.php?PHPSESSID=d2ceb22b7a1dd52d5719351779168f9e

I got the Panel B
http://clongen.com/Tick_Borne_Illnesses_Panels.php

I picked Clongen because they have their own proprietary testing panel for Lyme and other tick born illnesses. I wasn't willing to play around with the Western Blots and the inadequacies of LabCorp or the standard PCR that only looks for one genetic signature. Still there is only a 35% chance they will detect any disease. But that is better than the 12% chance I was looking at using LabCorp.

I will up date this post when I get my results.

The test was done on my spinal fluid. I had to have a spinal tap anyway so I decided to do this test out of pocket to see if I could track the penetration of the disease into my nervous system.

Note of Caution: Originally my neurologist was supposed to take the sample and send it to Clongen for me but we had a snafu.

My neurologist office doesn't physically pack up the sample for sending . They send it to LabCorp for that. But LabCorp being the competitive company that it is won't send out to other labs so they refused to send the sample to Clongen. They will send to one of our local hospitals so the neurologist had it sent to Rex Hospital. He asked Rex to send it to Clongen. But Rex refused and said they only send labs out to the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic wouldn't know an acurate Lyme test from a whole in the ground. My neurologist was spelling out the bacteria names for Lyme disease because the Mayo lab director had never heard of them.

I have no idea that this is going on. I am flat on my back recovering from a spinal tap when I get the call telling me the sample is going to Mayo.

I call Rex immediately and tell them not to send to Mayo. My husband and I have pow-wow. We call the neurologist office and they are totally frustrated. I say to them 'what if my husband picks up the sample and we send it ourselves?' Their tone softened; "well that would be just fine". Off my husband goes and picks up the sample that has now been sent back to LabCorp. He packs it up and FedEx Priority Mails to Clongen.

We are waiting for the results.

If you choose this route then make sure to check your bill from Clongen. They tried to charge us twice. This is a common problem with many labs.