Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why you were given metronidazole: was it for Lyme disease or did you develop a C difficile infection from other antibiotics? I'm just curious because I'm a physician and have never heard of using metronidazole for Lyme disease.

View on HN

It was for Lyme, and IIRC the justification for including it in my course of treatment was roughly what lisa_henderson describes below.

Thanks, I actually searched initially for metronidazole and lyme disease through pubmed (which is the Google of medical literature) and passed over one interesting article that could support its use (fortunately not behind a paywall):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3132871/

However, this study was done on petri dish cultures of borellia and didn't actually look at whether or not it improved symptoms in people (which I imagine is a difficult thing to study in this field).

When I searched for borrellia and metronidazole there was one more article for in vitro use from the 1990s: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10379684

Reply on news.ycombinator.com