Anyway, I wanted to discuss here difficulties with using the Web as a diagnostic resource.

When I first decided something was wrong, I figured I could go to the Web and come away with a decent guess as to the problem. IMHO, doctors are second cousins to auto mechanics, and are not above preying on ignorance. If you go to a random mechanic with no idea of what's wrong with your car, they'll do a bunch of needless testing, fix a bunch of things that are already ok, create some new problems for the next visit, and charge you and arm and a leg for their services. Better to go in with some idea of your problem, so you can do some damage control.

So I started looking. I Googled "medical diagnosis", and found a few "free" diagnosis sites. I tried two or three of these sites. Invariably, after a LONG chain of mostly irrelevant questions, I ended up at a screen that said in effect "You are in mortal danger. Send us a chunck of money and we will give you the details."

**** that.

The next thing I did was go to some medical info sites to look up some of my symptoms. For example, I have tingling in my face. So I Googled "facial paresthesia". The first listing is at WrongDiagnosis.com. Going to that page, I see nine possible causes, most of which I can eliminate. Lyme is not among them. In fact, Lyme is not mentioned on any of the top 20 pages for facial paresthesia.

I really had to dig. I kept searching for various clusters of my symptoms, and checking the resulting causes. I looked at MS, neurofibromatosis, trigeminal neuralgia, fibromyalgia, HIV, diabetes, etc. etc. In each case the symptom list didn't seem to match up.

I don't remember what symptom or symptoms got me in touch with Lyme, but when I saw Lyme, a bell went off in my head with respect to my rash I had gotten a couple years ago. And when I checked the symptom list, it was a much closer match to what I have been experiencing.