A first-year medical student condemned believers in “chronic Lyme disease”.
This is not apologetics. I just want us to treat everything fairly and consider the facts. And don’t lecture me when you haven’t finished school yourself.
The lady complains that patients with simple “rheumatoid arthritis” and “multiple sclerosis” receive answers from doctors and therapists practising functional medicine for their systemic problems (i.e. almost all Lyme symptoms).
She says, “It is also well known that some people experience long-term symptoms and damage from Lyme disease, sometimes referred to as post-Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS). This is not a chronic infection, but rather the body taking more time to return to its starting point.” He then explains how tests can still be positive even in this condition, and there is some truth in this, of course, but he forgets that serological tests are no longer the only ones available; just as there is a test in Europe that directly detects the pathogen, direct tests are now also used in the US.
He then states that “chronic Lyme disease” is an undefined term, but he uses the term PTLDS without hesitation. He obviously hasn’t read the 2019 article in Antibiotics (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6963229/), whose authors are also university students (not), and which has over 200 references. However, he knows by heart (unfortunately not) that PTLDS is a diagnosis of exclusion.
What I find very interesting about this is that he does not analyse in depth what tests are used to confirm that Lyme disease has been cured. This is because the relevant PTLDS publication (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666991925001848?via%3Dihub), obviously written by French “university students”, only lists laboratory tests for confirming previous Lyme disease. If it is a matter of exclusion, how can I rule out Lyme disease and its co-infections? What is required in the PTLDS to rule out Lyme disease: 1. previous diagnosis of Lyme disease, 2. the patient received the prescribed treatment (i.e. 2-3 weeks of doxycycline), 3. the treatment was taken properly. I am not aware of any other disease in which completing the full course of treatment would rule out the remaining disease or recurrence!
Imagine that a mother with breast cancer undergoes surgery. When a lump reappears in her breast, it would not be removed or examined again because “we already operated on her breast cancer, so it must be something else!”
And if the healthcare system has failed, then the unfortunate patient will indeed go to a “quack” and take whatever he or she can say and give. And the author adds that this is often contaminated with bacteria and heavy metals (oh dear, now I’m going to get it, but let’s say the same as some vaccines? – Yes, I am not anti-vaccination, it’s just what the facts show).
And then he comes up with the solution himself: that an alternative diagnosis will indeed be made in “chronic” cases: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, “degenerative spine disease”, etc. And the author calls these known diseases, and he can cure them! Unfortunately, these diseases are autoimmune processes of unknown origin, which may be caused by infection. What I know for sure is that I have seen many cases where these conditions were cured with Lyme treatment and combined antibiotics.
And yes, dear Madam, this is frustrating for the patient and the doctor. And for me too. But it is not the fact that chronic symptoms are misdiagnosed as Lyme disease, but that there is a solution, yet even university graduates have not learned critical thinking. Unfortunately, medicine is not evolving with the changing generations.
P.S. It is pointless to attack me for promoting the term “chronic Lyme”. No, I don’t think it is well defined either. My colleagues came up with the term I like to use a long time ago, and it does not cause any controversy: “Lyme disease with chronic symptoms”. But I also write the other term, PTLDS, wherever possible, because no one can prove that the symptoms are not caused by Lyme after Lyme treatment.
Source of the debate: https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2026/02/the-myth-the-legend-the-truth-about-chronic-lyme-disease-guest-opinion-by-samantha-ballas.html
