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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of quackery surrounding lyme disease, and patients who think they might have lyme can easily end up spending a fortune on dubious treatments and unproven tests.

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That's certainly true, but what other option do you have? When you have Lyme, you are an explorer in an alien landscape. Medicine has not caught up to the incidence of the disease, and people with Lyme must do something. They can't all just wait around in pain and misery for the FDA to approve a treatment.

I think the controversy is mostly around 'chronic' Lyme. It's not clear there is such a thing. It's profile (being mostly female for example) suggests it's not Lyme but some other condition that is undiagnosed. Having multiple family members with Lyme at some point I know it's a terrible disease and difficult to treat.

Lyme disease is easily curable with a large course of antibiotics. Now, there can be complications that persist after the infection is cured (arthritis, cardiac issues, and - controversially - fatigue and post-treatment Lyme syndrome). But the infection itself is curable today.

You are technically right, but I find this pedantry counterproductive. When someone is simply frustrated by their lack of options to alleviate their suffering, inserting yourself solely to make sure they're using the rightest possible terminology while ignoring their actual point a) doesn't add anything of value to the discussion, unless the distinctions between any of these terms can materially advance the discussion, b) is plainly dismissive of people's distress, and c) probably incorrectly assumes that they don't actually know what they're talking about when many people who are experiencing the alleged long-term side effects of Lyme, such as my wife, use that word as colloquial umbrella term to describe their symptoms. They've probably read more about it than you have, but writing out "fatigue and post-treatment Lyme syndrome" gets old.

The problem is that most of these people who are diagnosed by "chronic lyme" actually have CFS (according to multiple studies). So, it's unlikely that any lyme treatments will work for these patients.

As for CFS, many people do fully recover from that (I have myself, for example). But going down the chronic lyme rabbit hole is unlikely to bring any kind of relief.

What exactly is CFS?

Chronic fatigue syndrome.

The initial comment was using a colloquialism. It wasn’t discussing specific outcomes or treatments for which precise terminology would have been necessary. The correction was pure pedantry.

The antibiotic treatment is only effective within a few weeks of getting bitten. If you are misdiagnosed and miss the treatment window, the antibiotic treatment is no longer effective.

Nope:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067368...

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