Lyme Disease, Part 4

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

Lyme disease is a difficult condition to diagnose. Testing is often ordered incorrectly, or the tests ordered are not the best available.

Most commercial tests designed to detect chronic infections are based on measuring your body’s immune reaction (the presence of antibodies) to the microbe. The problem with Lyme is that the primary cells it infects are white blood cells themselves. Why is this a problem? Because if white blood cells are infected, they lose the ability to produce antibodies, which is what the tests are looking for. This is a false negative test result.

There are direct blood tests for the co-infections associated with Lyme, such as Babesia. But, the blood tests have difficulties too. For example, the FISH test for Babesia is done on blood, but it lives primarily in the central nervous system, joints and connective tissue. It doesn’t live in the blood stream, at least in significant amounts, so it is easily missed when looking in the blood.

Lyme Disease, Part 3

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

In the third article of this series, we will look at the common presentations of Lyme disease.

Unfortunately, Lyme disease is a very difficult to diagnose using conventional tests. There is great variation in the presentation of the disease. Your particular symptoms will vary greatly depending on where you have contracted it (joints, muscles, nervous tissue, etc.) and whether or not you have coexisting infections, which most do.

Dr. Klinghardt, well known for his successful treatment of neurological illness and chronic pain with Integrative Medicine, says, “underneath that (Lyme infection), there’s often an infection with Mycoplasma. We still don’t know if it’s really transferred with the same bite or if people had it all along and become symptomatic when the immune system is suppressed by the spirochetes.”