Lyme Misdiagnosis Can Divert Patients From Correct Treatment

[CanLyme Note: We agree totally that a thorough diagnostic work-up should preclude any diagnosis.  Not everything is Lyme borreliosis.  What is so dismaying, however, is the focus of the US CDC MD’s on the few cases such as those listed in this article, while they ignore the tens of thousands of legitimate chronic Lyme disease cases. We in Canada are already having our provincial medical officers and Infectious Disease doctors use odd cases to justify missing thousands of legitimate cases. Surely we hope Christina Nelson, MD, is not surprised by her findings. Most chronic Lymeborreliosis patients go to more than 5 doctors and often get a different diagnosis by each physician, dependent usually upon the specialty of the physician so clearly misdiagnosis is nothing new, and goes both ways. Also, I did not see anywhere written in the article that a person cannot have cancer and Lyme borreliosis.  In fact, that is an interesting area of study because there have been many people with Lyme who later develop various cancers. Take a moment and comprehend the implications of the August 19th, 2013 admission by the CDC that stated, ooops, we made a mistake, instead of the 30,000 cases per year we have been reporting, it should have been 300,000 cases per year.  270,000 in each year were missed and left to develop chronic Lyme borreliosis.  Hundreds of thousands have been incorrectly diagnosed, given many different labels for their illness.  They are then prescribed serious medications inappropriately, because it was Lyme all along.  Many died. Will the US CDC now work with the patient groups and their experts to do extensive human study using the most sophisticated DNA sequencing technology to begin to understand the prevalence and severity of chronic Lyme disease?  We think not, because they do not want to release control of the messaging. It will take stronger legislation to bring the patient and their expert into the policy, and research funding process, which is inane considering the patient is the ultimate stakeholder, and, first at the table.]

article…

Larry Hand November 4th, 2014

Misdiagnosis of chronic Lyme disease can cause delays in diagnosis and treatment for the actual conditions, according to a research letter published online November 3 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Christina Nelson, MD, MPH, from the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, Colorado, write that chronic Lyme disease “is a loosely defined diagnosis given by a small number of physicians — who are not usually infectious disease experts — to patients with various nonspecific symptoms, including patients with no objective evidence of Lyme disease.”

Read full article