Lyme disease: Easily cured or insidious chronic infection?Some say it's behind other ailments with confusing symptoms.By Bill RadfordTHE GAZETTECOLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -
Like the flu, it hit hard and fast. David Martz could hardly get out of bed. "I knew something real serious was wrong."
Martz, a doctor, fell ill in April 2003. He was hospitalized for two weeks and underwent "every test known to man." He got worse, but weeks and months went by before he was told the bad news.
He had ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that attacks nerve cells controlling voluntary muscles. You'll probably be in a wheelchair in six months, Martz was told, and dead in two years.
A newspaper clipping sent by a family friend gave Martz a possible alternative diagnosis: chronic Lyme disease. And it put him in the middle of what is being called the Lyme Wars, a debate over the true threat posed by Lyme disease.
Lyme disease is a tick-borne infection most prevalent in the northeastern United States. Mainstream medicine regards it as generally simple to recognize and easy to treat with a few weeks of antibiotics.
But some doctors view Lyme disease as something more common and more insidious, often hiding in the body and being manifested as a chronic infection requiring months or years of intensive antibiotic treatment.
They regard Lyme disease as a "great impostor," accounting for some cases of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Gulf War syndrome and other illnesses with often vague and confusing symptoms.
Martz, who has largely recovered after long-term antibiotic therapy, is a believer - so much so that he started a practice focused on chronic Lyme disease. A past president of the Colorado Medical Society, Martz, 65, now finds himself on medicine's fringes.
The debate boils down to hope. Are patients diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease being given false hope and wasting money on years of treatment? Or are doctors who don't believe in the condition denying desperate patients hope when there could be some?
"Rather than close the mind, where's the harm in saying maybe there's another dimension to it?" Martz said. "Let's think out of the box, as the saying goes, and stay open to the possibility that maybe this is more complicated than we realized."
Martz has seen about 350 patients in the first year: roughly 70 with neurological, ALS-like illnesses, the rest with problems such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.
"The average person has seen 24 previous doctors, and they've been told that they have maybe lupus, but it doesn't fit, maybe MS, but it doesn't fit, maybe psychiatric problems," he said.
About 80 percent test positive for the Lyme bacterium using IGeneX testing and are given the option of long-term antibiotic therapy, Martz said. Those who test negative but still fit "the classical clinical picture" also are offered the therapy, and many improve, Martz said.
"That just shows that the testing is not adequate yet."
The therapy is not a cure-all, Martz stressed. And, at $2,000 to $3,000 a month, it isn't likely to be covered by insurance, because insurance companies don't commonly recognize chronic Lyme disease.
"You need to go into it understanding that it may not have any benefit at all," Martz said. "But if you wish to try it, we're willing to help you."
Number of Cases
In 2003, 21,273 cases of Lyme disease were reported by 44 states and the District of Columbia. States with the highest incidence of Lyme included Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey.
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