Chronic Lyme Disease Support | Lyme Disease Blog

January 23, 2009

Personal Chronic Lyme Disease Support

Having chronic Lyme Disease is no picnic.

It’s often a lonely road with nowhere safe to turn for Lyme Disease help beyond your doctor’s office. Mainly you feel lousy, sometimes for months or even years. This can have a major impact on your relationships, your job, and your pocketbook. If all this isn’t enough, you’ve got added stressors that don’t come along with other, better-known chronic illnesses. Stressors like: Some people, including many doctors, don’t think Lyme is a real disease. They consider you mentally unstable if [...]

January 25, 2012

10 Comments

Songbirds Disperse Lyme Ticks Across North America

Canadian Lyme researcher John D. Scott’s studies of songbirds in Ontario, Canada have found that ground-foraging birds such as sparrows, warblers, wrens, juncos, and thrushes (including the American Robin) are often infested with Lyme disease ticks. In a study between 2007 and 2009, Scott reported that 481 ticks were collected from 211 songbirds in Canada. [...]

October 25, 2011

427 Comments

What’s an LLMD?

LLMD stands for Lyme-Literate Medical Doctor. Any kind of licensed medical doctor can be called an LLMD. They don’t all belong to the same medical specialty. Earning the unofficial LLMD designation comes with practicing medicine according to the diagnostic and treatment guidelines of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (or ILADS). There are also [...]

June 27, 2011

282 Comments

Just How Complex Lyme Disease Really Is

Guest post by Doug M, New York State. Lyme disease continues to amaze me with its astonishingly varied and complex combinations of symptoms. Perhaps it might be helpful if I described my own journey. I first complained to my doctor in 1988 about shoulder pain. “Bursitis” he said, and wrote it in my record as [...]

June 21, 2011

14 Comments

Babesiosis Can Be Spread Through Blood Transfusions

Many Lyme patients also have Babesiosis (or Babesia), a malaria-like infection that lives in red blood cells and can be fatal. While Lyme doctors have known about Babesia and test and treat for it, there hasn’t been much said about it in the press. That’s why articles like this one in the New York Times [...]

May 17, 2011

88 Comments

Lyme Disease: What’s Luck Got to Do With It?

Having Lyme disease is often a life-altering experience, like no other health problem you’ve ever had or could imagine ever having. If it’s not caught and treated early, Lyme produces a wide-range of debilitating symptoms. No two Lyme sufferers have exactly the same complaints. Lyme is tricky to diagnose. It’s harder to treat, especially because [...]

April 20, 2011

305 Comments

Jarisch-Herxheimer Reaction in Lyme Disease

The Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction (or Herx for short) is an inflammatory response to antibiotic treatment for certain diseases (although some non-antibiotic treatments can produce the reaction). It’s also referred to as a “healing crisis” or “die-off,” meaning a detoxification of dead or dying bacteria and other pathogenic organisms in the body. A Herxheimer reaction feels like [...]

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