posted
Our friend was bitten by a deer tick recently, and developed a rash. The tick was sent in for testing and came back negative for Lyme. He has no other symptoms.
Makes me wonder if some of those supposedly "easy to cure" cases that involve a bite and a rash were never going to develop into Lyme in the first place?
Posts: 228 | From Mass. | Registered: Feb 2009
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posted
It is rare to have a rash and NO LYME. I would not trust the tick test. I had one come back negative many years ago and I got sick 9 days later.
I doubt he is "out of the woods" on this.
-------------------- --Lymetutu-- Opinions, not medical advice! Posts: 96222 | From Texas | Registered: Feb 2001
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Keebler
Honored Contributor (25K+ posts)
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posted
- There is no test that can confirm the absence of lyme. None. There are many false negatives.
But the classic bulls eye rash is a postive test, itself. Right there.
Reasons for False Negative (Seronegative) Test Results in Lyme Disease
He may have no other symptoms NOW - but that can change - bit time. It has for many. Often a month or two after the bite. Sometimes, when the body is faced with added stressors, such as a cold or an accident.
Diagnosing Lyme Disease (&/or whatever else is going on)
Other tick-borne infections and other chronic stealth infections - as well as certain conditions that can hold us back - are discussed here. -
Posts: 48021 | From Tree House | Registered: Jul 2007
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Keebler
Honored Contributor (25K+ posts)
Member # 12673
posted
- Usually my note taking is better than this. The first couple sentences do not sound like how I talk. But I did not note who else may have said this. Perhaps some of this from the book and some from myself -- clearly below is from the book, where marked.
What many people don't know is that 10 strains of lyme cause only the lyme rash. They don't cause any lyme disease at all.
So, that's why a person can get a rash and just take a little doxy and be fine. They actually would have been fine even without the doxy.
On the flip side, if lyme is present just doxycycline can CAUSE lyme to become chronic as doxy pushes spirochetes to go into the cyst form.
Combination treatment - with very specific Rx to address cyst form as well, is vital to prevent that. Antibiotics do not do this.
Back to the rash but no symptoms: as mentioned above, that may be true for NOW but it can change. Still, maybe not.
Here is an exerpt from the book "Cure Unknown" by Pam Weintraub in which she talks about this aspect of lyme disease:
p. 342 tells how Ben Luft, infectious disease specialist and Daniel Dykhuizen, evolutionary biologist, working together at Stony Brook went out into the field collecting ticks and analyzing Borrelia.
A few years later, they had a graduate student travel the Eastern seaboard as far north as New Hampshire and south through the Carolinas collecting ticks infected with B. burgdorferi spirochetes.
p.343 �The Borrelia were duly isolated and compared for differences in their genes.
Eventually the researchers focused on twenty strains, each with a different version of the changeable OspC. Working with those twenty strains, Luft learned that six didn�t infect humans and ten caused only a rash.
Only four of the twenty could leave the skin to invade other tissue like the heart and joints or the brain.
The most virulent of the strains turned out to be the prototypical B31, the version of B. burgdorferi � ultimately isolated by Burgdorfer and Barbour at the Rocky Mountain labs in 1981.
The implications are profound.
One of the most important is that if just four strains of the twenty cause disseminated infection, then the roster of rash-based studies on the treatment of early Lyme disease, conducted from the 1980s to the present, would have to be reassessed.
Take a moment to ponder the simple math: It would be impossible to accept results based on the assumption that 100 percent of Lyme rashes can cause invasive disease when a significant percent cannot.
Some of the classic studies claim very high cure rates for early infection; yet if the causative strain were of the rash-only variety, then even orange juice would be a �cure.�
Are recommended treatment protocols truly curing most of those with early, invasive borreliosis? Or has noise from rash-only strains obscured less rosy results?� (p. 344) -
Posts: 48021 | From Tree House | Registered: Jul 2007
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Keebler
Honored Contributor (25K+ posts)
Member # 12673
posted
- I noted that doxycycline, alone, can cause chronic lyme. This explains:
posted
Thank you so much Keebler! I have been trying to remember where, among the many books I have read about Lyme, I came across that reference to the rash-only strains of Borrelia. I will go back and consult Pam Weintraub's book again. I love her point about the orange juice "cure."
Of course we and our friend know to keep watch in the coming weeks or months for any other symptoms that might arise.
The tick testing lab states that it has 95% accuracy, and a false negative is a possibility.
Posts: 228 | From Mass. | Registered: Feb 2009
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