In clinical practice, it has long been reported that a subset of Lyme disease patients experience a range of symptoms such as exhaustion, cognitive problems, and musculoskeletal pain, which may last for a prolonged period of time. Such symptoms, which may vary from mild to extreme, have been documented in prospective and population-based studies in endemic regions of Lyme disease throughout the literature. After Lyme disease was first described in the late 1970s in the United States, but before the pathogenic bacteria were known, it was noticed that untreated Lyme arthritis patients have often reported recurrent symptoms such as headache, exhaustion, myalgia, and hyperesthesia. In some of the earliest cases series of treated patients it was first reported that these symptoms could persist after antibiotic treatment The etiology of these symptoms is unclear, but several disease-causing mechanisms, including microbial persistence, host immune dysregulation by inflammatory or s...
If your doctor did a thorough job, he or she probably tested you for Lyme disease before finally diagnosing you with fibromyalgia. You likely received a negative test result and thought that you’d ruled out Lyme as a possible cause for your symptoms. You can receive a negative test result for Lyme and still have Lyme disease . What many people don’t realize is the standard testing used by most doctors – the ELISA and western blot tests – are only about 50-60 percent accurate. That’s equivalent to a coin toss! I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in early 2014. During that process, I was screened for Lyme at least twice using the standard testing. Both tests came back negative. I eventually sought out more advanced testing and was diagnosed with Lyme disease last spring. Since then, I’ve interviewed numerous doctors and patients about the connection between fibromyalgia and tick-borne infections (TBI), like Lyme, and I’ve come to a troubling conclusion: I suspect millions...