I dont care who he is or how many people say he is wonderful, that is just bad medicine. Every single case of Lyme disease is different. Each patient must be treated according to their own case, personal history, symptoms, co-infection status and response to therapy. To say that nodody should have more than 4 months is like having a cookie cutter approach and saying Lyme disease is all the same.

My advice, get to new LLMD, and quickly.

You cant go off your meds when you are finally starting to feel better. You must be 100% symptom free and then some for 2 months and then keep going on maintenance therapy.

Do some research and dont settle for anything less than you deserve.
Nothing is more important than your health.
It is great news that you are improving, and you have to continue, if you stop your meds, you will crash.

I don't know the entirety of your conversation with your doctor, but I think I would ask him for clarification. Was he speaking in generalities, or is that his hard and fast policy? Is there a rationale in his understanding of lyme disease as to why 4 months is the 'cut off' time? Does he do this with all his patients, or with certain drug combos? If he does decide to stop the drug combo you are on, what is he planning on using instead?

I had a conversation with my llmd about the length of different combos. I thought that he might be changing my combos too quickly - that the effect may not be there for a couple of months. He told me that based on his experience, that if the drug combos are going to work, they work within 4 weeks or so. And 'works' means that he looks at the patient's symptology - better, worse or the same.

I asked him about those cases here where a few people didn't see any response for maybe three or four months. He told me that in his experience, these were the exception rather than the rule.

The treatment of this disease is such a crap shoot. I think the llmd's do the best they can trying to find the right combinations of meds, be it oral or iv, and at the same time, trying to minimize the impact that the drugs can have on our systems. I know of some lyme docs that give their patients a short 'break' from abx. Don't really know if this is a good thing, from the 'killing the ketes' perspective, but it makes sense for the person's body to take a break. I haven't heard of any particular time limit for the use of abx, other than by ducks....