The post I'm responding to is a stanford researcher who is posting about lyme disease. Is she a lyme sufferer? If she is she doesn't say so, and I'm not making any assumptions.

You are attacking me for saying "lyme people" even as you use "lyme patients" in the same sentence. There is no difference: both use lyme as an adjective to define a subpopulation using a completely innocuous starting population ("people" v "patients"). I'm just starting with a bigger group, because unaffected family, friends, etc can have these opinions too.