15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s. I’ve had every blood test under the sun, numerous sleep studies and tried every vitamin. I’ve had no answers and no change.
Sometimes, I've believed that it impacts my performance at work. Sometimes I feel like I should be retiring, but I’m not even 40 yet. Sometimes, it's not so bad.
I saw a video on controlled hypothermia the other day, which seems like snake oil. I guess that’s next on my list to try. I feel desperate, but I’m just having to get used to the feeling of desperation, because there appears to be no answer or solution.
The theory of Lyme is that is a really slowly replicating bacteria, once every 24 hours vs 20 minutes typical for most. It does respond to antibiotics but the slow replication rate means you would need antibiotics in your system for a much much longer period to have the same number of kill opportunities (it is during replication that bacteria will absorb antibiotics and be killed as I understand it). Roughly you would need antibiotics for 3x24 as long as a typical antibiotic treatment (over 2 years of antibiotics which would ruin the rest of your body). The hyperthermia treatment is intense, it is designed to mimic a fever. One of our bodies approaches to killing bacteria, is getting them hot enough to rupture their cells. It wasnt an easy or a quick fix after treatment, which was disheartening at times. But a year on she has just noticed she is feeling better, has little to no pain and just the other day took a run along the beach. Anyway I just wanted to endorse a plan you were already thinking about. I acknowledge that a chronic health issue is hard, hard in a way that those of us who a generally healthy can’t even comprehend. I wish you all the best
Adding to it, I want to share a bit of my story and some words that could help as well.
I haven't ever checked for Lyme diagnosis, but I've experienced symptoms that are diabetes adjacent and cured those through diet and other experimentation. Through the last 10 years of so I obsessed over and reversed various medical illnesses that were said to be incurable, since for that exact reason as you said "conventional options have been exhausted". In my journey I met one man who exhausted many treatment options for Lyme and his success strategy looked as follows: a) he took EMF seriously and rebuilt his home for EMF minimization (happy to share strategy and solutions for you more here, I follow a cheap mans version of his more expensive work), b) he would take particular vitamins and other nutrients, and c) Rife therapy. He had an expensive plasma machine that would send particular frequencies into his body through light plasma (more expensive Rife frequency modulation end of things) but many machines exist that are cheaper. Spooky sells these machines, some of the solutions include PEMF which I believe are electricity based. I've used their remote frequency machines and also a scalar version for overall health and haven't had to use them since. My experience with Rife is limited. My basic drivers for health now are grounding for inflammation reduction (feet on grass every so often, or grounding mats), EMF reduction, information management (try notification zero and how it affects your biology: no notifications on your phones or devices ever and that includes notification bubbles - Calls from loved ones OK), and diet/food/water/sleep. I'll also use a Schumann tuned set of tuning forks I have 2 sets one that use a weight vibration and another that uses just the sound. my sleep and stress improve considerably when I use the forks, and I believe they have an affect like grounding but on the frequency end only. When I was first starting this journey, I would do pure cold showers in winter months and kept the practice for years, it was the first time I noticed a big shift in my health and wellbeing that lasted and also kept my mood elevated for a while after. I have also used more expensive cold baths, cryotherapy, etc and I think they can all approach and work for the type of Hypothermia treatment that geekfeatures is mentioning. My intuition is experimentation with these first, 3-5x a week, would mimic a similar process in the body to the hypothermic heavy therapy and may even be triggering it at a similar level to the paid therapies.
Anyway I'll stop there to keep this limited in word count. Feel free to reach out here or personally via hello@mannan.is and good luck.
Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.
CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.
Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.
You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).
I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.
I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).
Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.
So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.
At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.
It took me about four years to fully understand my condition. Hope you figure out what is bothering you. The body is incredibly complex.
Chronic stress, now that's an interesting one. I've never regarded myself as stressed. Or, if I am stressed, I'm always stressed and it's just normal. But I see no reason to be stressed, but maybe I am. And I wonder, how much of stress is a cause, or a result. I've taken a year off work. Am I better for it? It's hard to say. I'm yet to find anything that I can say helps. I've only really found things that make it worse. Like alcohol, and sugar. Diabetes? Yeah, I've considered it. I've got 6 months of blood sugar monitoring data, with no discernible correlation between my levels and how I feel. Funny world <3
In particular, Garmin smartwatches have a very good measurement and intepretation with their "stress" and "body battery" features.
That's how I learned I was stressed while working. I have a Garmin watch and everyday I get an alert telling me I had a stressful day.
During the day if I do a little check-in where I observe how I feel, I often notice a lot of muscle tension, especially in the plexus area, and that I stop breathing for extended periods of time. I try to consciously relax, which would work for a few minutes before the tension comes again. I end up being exhausted almost everyday. My watch has been telling me I'm either in "recovery" or "strained" for months.
Stress can be difficult to notice, especially when you're stressed.
if you burn out at same time - it can take half year.
caffein makes you work TWO-FOUR times slower than you could without.
yeah, that is number i measured on self.
and yet i still do it - drugs are drugs - coffee makes me happy - cappuccino - to make effect longer and less strait compared to black shots.
also do not drink in the morning - feel pain of starting a day:)
the only reason you will not have job - you can start hating your job and leave. but you would do job more productive without coffee.
If I may ask as a coffee addict, what were some of these that affected you specifically?
And, yet, as an addict, i keep convincing myself that I can handle a little bit (like, 6-10 grams daily - which is nothing) and will re-addict myself every few months.
I should say that i have been actually handling 10 grams vastly better lately than i could even 6 grams a few years ago. Not sure what to attribute that to.
I really like coffee - i roast, grind and brew it at home. I should treat it as i do alcohol - only 1 drink, once in a while - but i'll probably remain like this for life...
easy to fall into "first idea good idea trap".
lack of ability to work in priorities.
lack of ability achieve long term goals, as long as these are not just extensive usage of self.
procrastination.
all this before even health issues like blood pressure and sleep disruption.
if worth to drop at least once for half year - experience panic attacks may be - and get on track back with better control of addiction :)
I'd try centanafadine and see a top ADHD specialist. There are a lot of variables: molecule, dose, release profile, melatonin timing.
What is worth checking:
* Comorbid anxiety or trauma symptoms (PTSD)
* Hormone imbalance
Just because your blood work is perfect, it doesn't mean all is good. I have hypomagnesemia - the tests were perfect, yet my body needs way more magnesium to function properly.
I desperately wanted ADHD meds to help, but in the end the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze so I stopped. I tried all 3 or 4 different stims and 2 non-stims.
Thank you for the pointers, I will look into them.
For example for methylphenidate, I'd recommend starting on 2.5mg (1/2 the smallest pill) for a week or two, until side effects go away, and then up the dose to 5mg.
In his case, he is mostly back to normal, albeit gluten intolerant, which will cause his symptoms to redevelop, namely spinal inflammation.
Its hard not to engender helplessness when hearing or dealing with types of issues, but I wish you perserverance in your search for answers, and grace when dealing with your problems.
Tried B6, every variation of magnesium (including threonate), all the typical sleep hygiene stuff.. nothing mattered.
It is treatable and the science is backed by peer-reviewed academic papers. https://www.survivingmold.com/legal-resources/publications/p...
Reasonably priced lab testing can be obtained without jumping through insurance hoops: https://www.moldco.com/
I have personally suffered from CIRS-wdb (water damaged building) for decades. By 2012 (age 44) I was so chronically sick with severe neurological, endocrine and digestive symptoms that I could not work and barely slept 3 hours a night for months. Brain fog, "ice pick" pains in the gut, muscular weakness and balance problems were among the many symptoms. It was so bad that I was preparing for the end within a year and was spending my limited time with my wife and young children. Years of medical tests and consults (Cleveland Clinic) found nothing.
Fortunately, lots of googling found medical articles by Dr Ritchie Shoemaker listing many of the same multi-system symptoms. From the late 1990s he identified cohorts of patients with such symptoms and developed effective treatments. I drove out to Maryland and was treated by him from 2012-2013 following the Shoemaker protocol. We spent a substantial amount remediating the water damage in our home. My health improved incrementally to the point where I now work productively and actively mountain bike daily at age 59. I am about 91% recovered and have no doubt that I would have died without treatment. I take maintanence doses of Welchol and Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) and avoid water damaged buildings.
I have no financial interest in Moldco or Dr Shoemaker but feel compelled to share my experience with those who seem to be suffering similarly.
I almost did not write this post. Nearly every afflicted person I have shared CIRS info with has ignored it and continued their health decline. I hope that you or someone reading this will take the steps and improve their health.
Other: Dark, cold, quiet bedroom. Sleep study. Vicious dietary improvement. If all else fails: move and change jobs. If that doesn't fix it, try one of those drug induced purges with ibogaine.
If it's not severe, it may be simply getting older.
My best answer for my own sake is just burnout, exasperated by some underlying depression. I can have good periods when job stress is low and I make good life choices. Incidentally, I had a blood test show borreliosis randomly 10 years ago, but doubt that’s relevant.
I left a very high stress job for one that pays less, but has zero stress. Within 1 week I had to come off the blood pressure medicine. Within 2 months I started weaning off the anxiety meds.
It's like I've been looking at life through frosted glass, and it's suddenly clear. I wish I had done this sooner.
The loss of income isn't the end of the world. You can make it work. I did.
Sometimes a treatment, perhaps especially one like that, you have to believe in. And I don't take paracetamol because every time I've taken it I don't really feel any better, than had I not taken any at all. So if the treatment needs me to believe in it, that THIS TIME, once and for all, that it's finally going to cure me, because I've ponied up 30,000 EUR, so it HAS to work, then I'm probably not the right candidate. Once I went to a spiritual healer who asked me to leave half way through because I wasn't playing along.
I’ve been chasing a similar symptom cluster: low-grade depression, anhedonia, "burnout", fatigue, poor sleep, stress intolerance, low motivation / executive function, loss of positive emotions including the ability to be "attracted" to things or feel affectionate, and low libido.
For years, I thought this was a mental/emotional health issue. But nothing I did seemed to impact it, including less stress and a sabbatical, and I finally started to wonder if it was more physiological than psychological. My symptoms were psychological (ish) but I started to wonder if there were underlying biological causes that amounted to more than "not handling life well, not trying hard enough, etc."
I eventually ran into a functional medicine practitioner who, for the first time ever, described a process that can happen in our bodies that fit my symptoms to a T. I don't have a good summary of it to post but, essentially, inflammation can cause the brain to become chronically fatigued (in the sense of not having the energy it needs), which can lead to hormone problems, which then recursively cause additional brain health issues. I'm doing a poor job describing it but, when it's described to me, it fit what I experienced almost exactly.
FWIW, it was incredibly liberating when I finally had a reason to think maybe this whole thing was something happening to me instead of being caused by me. A hormone specialist described it as: complex hormonal dysfunction secondary to chronic stress and inflammation.
A functional medicine workup found a mix of hormone-utilization issues, thyroid conversion issues, low-ish usable testosterone despite decent total testosterone, low iron availability despite elevated ferritin, and some inflammation markers. I also have a couple genetic variants that may matter in this context: MTHFR and APOE 3/4.
Mold/mycotoxin exposure is another possible contributor in my case. I’m not convinced it’s “the answer,” but testing suggested past exposure and possible ochratoxin involvement, so it’s now part of the differential rather than something I’d dismiss.
Some non-standard labs that they have started looking at in my case: free+total T, SHBG, estradiol, pregnenolone/DHEA-S, free T3/free T4/reverse T3, iron/TIBC/ferritin/transferrin saturation, B12/folate/homocysteine, inflammatory markers, and mold/home-environment testing if the history fits.
At a recent visit with my provider, she mentioned that just the low free T, thyroid, and iron would be enough to knock someone down and feel terrible. And I have other things going on besides that.
I work with Ashley Giles from Origin Medical in Georgetown, Indiana (USA). I believe she can work with people who aren't local. What I appreciate most about Ashley is that she's willing to look at the whole pattern — endocrine, nutrition, inflammation, sleep, stress physiology, and environment together. And she really knows her stuff.
I'm about 10 months into treatment and expect this to be a 2-3 year process to get back to normal. I'm better than I was...I'm at least mostly functional now on a day to day basis. But a lot of my symptoms are still present in one degree or another. So, no magic bullets here.
If anyone wants to discuss: randy@syrings.us
Douwes F. Komplextherapie der chronischen Borreliose (Lyme disease) - Ein neuer Therapieansatz: die Antibiotika augmentierte Thermoeradikation (AAT). OM & Ernährung. 2018;164:F10.
Douwes F. The successful antibiotic augmented thermal eradication of chronic lyme disease. Paper presented at the 32nd ESHO Meeting, Berlin, 16–19 May 2018.
After serious issues piling up for a very long time and an equally long journey to get to the root what was bothering me medically I presented to Dr. Douwes a couple years back in his clinic in Bad Aibling.
The experience was a bit frightening, to say the least. Their methodology to get a diagnosis was basically just examining my medical history followed by a dark field microscopy (i.e. visually checking a blood sample for spirochetes). After that I was diagnosed with late stage lyme and offered two options: a very handwritten prescription (pencil on notepad, w/o doctors signature, not rubberstamped, looking very shady) for herbal ingredients (basically artemisia annua leaves and some roots to brew a tea) - without any tips where to get that from and not really exact dosages given. Option 2: ambulant Hyperthermia + painkillers (to supress pain from the hyperthermia) + a combination of antibiotics (parenteral) for 2 or 3 weeks. Extracting a fortune (20k ballpark)
They also offer hyperthermia treatment for cancer and long covid & me/cfs if I am not mistaken.
The visit really had a smell to it and left me with unease. Look up the group's company network in the Handelsregister and decide for yourself, I got some PE vibes from it. I chickened out and went to someone else, luckily Germany has quite a few private MDs specializing on lyme and other tickborne diseases. What I got in general: most treatments are not evidence based and theres lots of snake oil around, some of the patients are very desparate, me included back then. PS: I made good progress, but am still on meds since. Apparently there's no eradication for late stage lyme. Maybe there are lucky cases, but the slow growth of borrelia spirochetes makes treatment very tedious, much like or even worse than with tuberculosis. I am sure that their treatment actually does help, but it is kind of a hail mary (combo of broad spectrum antibiotics is basically applying blunt force).
What I've learned is that caffeine metabolism goes down with age and sleep gets lighter with age. Even if you can fall asleep easily, the residual caffeine in the middle of the night is enough to wake you out of light sleep. I made a tool to convince myself to cut back: http://jitterdone.com
What you could get away with in your twenties doesn't go unpunished once you're around thirty. And what you could get away with around thirty doesn't go unpunished once you're around forty.
I’m not optimistic this will be all that helpful. Just because the tick you found is negative, that tells you nothing about those you did not find. Just because a tick is positive, that does not mean that it has infected whoever it was attached to.
My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.
Another is Alpha Gal. It is a molecule carried in tick saliva that can cause serious allergies to red meat and even dairy. Because the molecule is in the saliva, it can be delivered immediately.
I’ve hear stats as long as 24 hours and as short as 30 seconds. One nurse told me that removing ticks by grasping and pulling means they transmit immediately, because you squeeze their contents through their mouths. I no longer believe any of the stats; seems like it could be at any time.
Whenever someone recommends removal using tweezers, I wonder if the person offering this advice has ever removed a well attached tick. I’ve found tools like a Tick Tornado work better, but are still problematic with smaller ticks.
Just breaking out the tweezers and yanking away was most emphatically not recommended. It can leave the mouth parts behind, if nothing else.
30+ years ago we would use ether to remove them, and I enjoyed burning them afterwards, it was so satisfying...
Makes me wonder of what would happen when you'd use the tips of two blank wires connected to a 1.5V battery?
ZAP!
Could be made into a small USB-gadget, to have it always available? Zaptastick!
It's already a thing*, in many different variations. Some use piezo-electrics, advertised as 'battery free'. And countless other stuff, many with some variation of Zap(p) in their names.
*Sort of, didn't see small 'passive' ones powered by USB.
Edit: Thinking about it, one could abuse and modify one of the countless e-vapes for it? Small enough in most cases, and self-powered.
And tiny ones are easy to remove with finger nails and some spit. But it requires some skill, do not stress out the ticks while they are attached and be careful to not partially remove it.
(Just had to remove 3 ticks on me I failed to spot after a late night walk yesterday, bigger and medium sized ones with tool, the small one with fingernail)
edit: and found a 4th one, but a tiny one(nymphe), they don't carry lyme disease as only ticks who have previously bitten a infected animal before will have it
Having an easy to use method which doesn't need special tools also helps by being able to immediately remove them.
There's the common advice to wear long pants & tuck them into socks. But at times I've found the exact opposite: short pants are fine.
Why: ticks can be hard to find on clothing. So you get home, inspect legs etc, and (later) a tick crawls from pants onto your leg & you may not notice.
Bare legs otoh make it trivial to check for ticks regularly during a walk, and/or when you feel something crawling up your leg. Since they're not yet attached then, a flick of your finger & they're off.
Some say "neurotoxin". Others say "neurotoxin till dried".
Frankly, I'll keep it away in any form. I dont want to harm my cats. Even if it means that I'm a human pincushion to mosquitoes and ticks.
They make flea collars for cats with permethrin (I found out just now) so it can’t be that toxic. If you’re really worried just get a pair of hiking pants and boots and keep them in a catproof tote.
If someone doesn’t notice a tick then they aren’t going to be considering prophylactic treatment anyway. It’s for the cases where ticks are discovered.
Next to that, in The Netherlands we have a site to report tick bites and if they had lyme disease or not. It’s good to know if you should be extra vigilant after a bite from a certain area. I think the self-test could be very useful for such sites.
Is there a similar site to report mosquito bites? They also carry many debilitation or fatal diseases.
I live in prime tick country. During peak season (March through June and again September through November) I can get 3 or 4 tick bites a day. I don't always get them all because they're completely painless while they're embedded (although I react strongly after they've been removed) and I've been diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease twice after developing all the classic symptoms. I am not alone in my area. If there was a site where you report tick bites here it would need to be pretty robust to handle the load and it would serve no purpose.
The local authorities have acknowledged the rampant outbreak of Lyme in the region. You do not need to provide the tick to authorities for identification. All you need to do is go to any pharmacy and tell them you've been bitten by a tick and they'll write you a prescription for Doxycycline on the spot.
From what I understand, you're spot on with your last note. Larval stage can be extremely hard to see even when fully engorged. Adult-stage ticks (at least Deer Ticks) are the size of a large grain of cooked brown rice. I've seen fully engorged nymph-stage that rival the size of a grape...
One other I found crawling up my white tshirt. Good reminder to wear light colored clothes when you’re out where ticks are.
the US gets a persistent amount of emergency room visits for this sort of treatment (tens of thousands annually), and with all the news about increased tick and lyme exposure a larger number of people treat it preemptively, especially with children
I only would consider antibiotics if the red ring appears. In general I suppose I already have resistance .. or the disease slumbering in my body.
I really don't believe that the vague long term symptoms a lot of people are describing in this thread are from ticks, especially people who don't spend much time outside in lyme endemic regions. Lyme has become a favorite label for quacks to describe the fatigue/pain syndrome that is sometimes called fibromyalgia. We don't really know what causes it (and it's probably not ticks), and taking high dose doxycycline for months is not the answer, other than maybe as a placebo.
Otherwise just enjoy your life.
This understanding will age like milk.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545493/table/rc1121.ap...
I don’t think anyone removes a tick and sets it on its merry way.
And some even just pull them off and squish them a bit and then throw them down the toilet, bin, outside. Those very likely survive for a new bite.
I have no idea if that is actually necessary, but it's easy and I think that probably kills it.
I might be mistaken, but I don't think you should go to the emergency room with a tick bite..? Do people really do that?
However it is somewhat area specific and Massachusetts is a hotbed when it comes to lyme disease carrying ticks. Lyme really should be treated right away.
I think urgent care wouldn't really be out of the question for a tick bite there. Telehealth is also something that likely could work here. It should be a 5 minute "Hey, got a tick bite, here's the picture of the tick, can I get a prescription for some antibiotics".
The reason to bias towards earlier treatment is because lyme disease can potentially result in nerve damage. For something that's already uncommon (a tick bite) throwing antibiotics at it isn't a terrible thing. Especially because that's also the general treatment for a number of tick born illnesses which don't have the obvious "bullseye".
I get the "we shouldn't needlessly take antibiotics" wisdom. But that's more about common ailments and situations where they aren't needed and don't help. Like, if you have a sore throat you shouldn't immediately get antibiotics.
I would feel better sending a tick that i pulled off of myself or my pets to a dedicated research lab rather than buy some one-off test kits which don’t contribute to the overall incidence rate of tick-borne illness.
I even sent a tick that I found in a potted plant from home depot (never attached to me) which turned out to carry rocky mountain spotted fever. I only sent that random tick in just to see if it carried anything, and since seeing the report from Penn State Ive wondered if i had contracted RMSF what my medical journey would have looked like, since i live on the opposite side of the continent from those ticks and i had found it mid-December. That would have required a Gregory House differential diagnosis where I live.
Is the reactive strip used in the kit an existing, well-proven product?
Now I've developed a case of Polish paranoia and tuck my trousers in socks, even if it's 35 degs :/
This is the way that "Loveless" (1991) was recorded, sans anesthesia.
Maybe some sort of biological control should be introduced instead. Guinea fowl on steroids.
If we allow ourselves a bit of science fiction, a drone flying over tall grass and burning every questing tick with laser would likely reduce the populations as well. A questing tick sits on the end of a blade of grass, waiting for a host; as such, it is necessarily visible.
The fucking republicans got rid of it, calling it "watching flies have sex".
Now, republicans and DOGE fucked around. Now, Texas and southern states are going to find out.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/doge-slashed-usda-staffing...
But since you're being needlessly snarky about it (it's not productive to suggest killing "the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels"), here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25118409/
>After hunts were initiated, number and frequency of deer observations in the community were greatly reduced as were resident-reported cases of Lyme disease. Number of resident-reported cases of Lyme disease per 100 households was strongly correlated to deer density in the community. Reducing deer density to 5.1 deer per square kilometer resulted in a 76% reduction in tick abundance, 70% reduction in the entomological risk index, and 80% reduction in resident-reported cases of Lyme disease in the community from before to after a hunt was initiated.
So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.
Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.
And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.