A physician could lose his license for treating serum-negative Lyme disease:
Today, Jemsek is known for treating patients he believes suffer from chronic Lyme disease, a form of the illness the medical establishment doesn’t believe exists. But many of his patients test negative when given the standard blood test for Lyme disease.The dispute could cost Jemsek his license to practice. In December, the North Carolina Medical Board charged him with improperly diagnosing Lyme disease and treating it via long-term courses of intravenous antibiotics, which violates the prescribed care standards.
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{ 4 comments }
Imagine treating your peptic ulcer patients with antibiotics well before they became standard treatment. There does appear to be a small, but real, probability of seronegative Lyme disease and, like much of medicine, there are proponents on both sides of the debate. See the letters (and response to)in Annals of Int. Med. concerning “Guidelines for the Clinical Diagnosis of Lyme Disease” at
http://www.annals.org/content/vol129/issue5/
If the treatment “did no harm” AND there was some subjective improvement of symptoms (quite possibly placebo) then the Medical Board should stay the hell outside the doctor-patient relationship. The FINAL textbook of medicine is yet to be written.
I’ve seen a lecture by one of the proponents of these treatments and they really do give whopping doses of IV antibiotics to these patients for months with no good studies to prove it works.
I’ve seen similar treatment plans using antivirals for “chronic HSV”. The symptoms treated are the usual list of vague, difficult to treat problems such as low back pain, dizziness, fatigue, etc. Is this science or just another gimmick?
Hello,
If you visit the following URL, you will find 17 pages of abstracts from the peer-reviewed literature documenting the presence of Lyme disease despite negative serology. The collection covers all stages of the disease, not just the early stage (where there is actually consensus on both sides of the debate that serology is insensitive).
http://www.lymeinfo.net/medical/LDSeronegativity.pdf
Chronic Lyme disease is a devastating illness, with neurological symptoms often predominating, despite the focus on arthritis. It has been studied for its qualities as a biowarfare agent. (see http://www.ctlymedisease.org)
Indeed it is this latter issue of Lyme as a disease of interest to the biowarfare establishment that has resulted in physicians being deliberately fed misinformation by federal-backed “experts”. A further source of lie-mongering is the giant insurance industry, and certain other commercial interests whose profits are threatened if the reality of this disease is made known.
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