Chronic Lyme Down the Road

In all epidemics doctor purposefully and inadvertently stall treatment and research by squabbling over what causes the disease and how to treat it. As they pontificate people die. 10% of Philadelphia's population died of Yellow Fever while warring factions in the medical community fought it out. One side said it was the 'environment'. The other side fought hard saying it was 'human contact'. Sadly they where both right. In AIDs one side yelled it was the poor judgement of drug users that drove the spread of AIDs while others said it was normal human sexual activity. Turned out it was a little of both. In Lyme they fight over everything. One side says it is under diagnosed and a serious epidemic while others say it is hard to catch and easy to cure. I image that in 20 years we will say. It was all of the above. In some place it will be a virulent epidemic while in other places it will spread slowly. Some people will have a strain of Lyme that dies easily in the face of 21 days of Doxy while others will contract antibiotic resistant strains at onset. We will probably come up with a new a better treatment. It may end up that we did over do it with antibiotics. But it is all we have like the 10 and 10 they used for Yellow Fever. It was horrible but it was the only thing available to try.

But we won't know until we stop fighting among ourselves and try new ideas, push for research and become pioneers in eradicating Lyme.