Lyme-Literate Practioners Know How to Help

Are you sick? Wondering why? Start by finding the right kind of help from practioners skilled at determining the source of your illness – not just your symptoms. Just treating symptoms does not improve lyme disease and in many cases makes it much worse. Lyme suffers travel around the marketplace spending billions on promising solutions for their health problems. Some are taken advantage of by practioners who are not lyme-literate and more often than not are told by the ill-informed that they are depressed or that they can’t be sick since because 'your labs look fine'.

Can’t find the help you need?

Many lyme victims are misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, ridiculed by the ignorant and ill-informed, fired from jobs, transmitting their disease to their loved ones and others, getting evicted from their homes, becoming disabled, loosing custody of their children, filing for bankruptcy, attempting and committing suicide, getting dumped by heir mates, having accidents, suffering tremendous pain, being imprisoned and institutionalized and sometimes dying as a result of not getting the right kind of help for this disease.

For the love of money

Lyme sufferers spend billions purchasing costly diagnostic tests that are generally unable to detect this insidious disease - either due to the insensitivity of the diagnostic tests used (the ones mandated by insurance companies), the incorrect diagnostic tests being ordered (by ill-informed practioners), the ability for the bacteria to hide inside the body, or a combination of all of these factors.

As the years go by, without an accurate diagnosis and a safe and effective treatment plan, the health of the lyme patient often continues to deteriorate. Soon their health expenses get out of control. Lyme disease is extremely expensive for the lyme consumer but consistently beneficial for those profiting from and supporting policies that promote the denial and misdiagnosis of lyme disease. Sick consumers who have been exposed to lyme disease (from any source) need to find out if they have lyme disease. Their primary goal should not be to obtain a positive lyme disease blood test as proof that they do in fact have lyme disease. Patients who wait for these types of results may die waiting. Ask yourself, “Is it more important to convince my insurance provider that I have lyme disease or should I try to recover from lyme and quite possible save my own life?" See articled entitled ' Is your health insurance sickening?'

Why seek help from a lyme-literate practioner?

Patients who are sick (especially those who suspect lyme disease) need to be promptly and carefully evaluated by a proactive lyme-literate practioner. Lyme-literate practioners know how to evaluate your condition using accurate diagnostic tools such as taking a careful history, performing a detailed physical exam and questioning you about your exposure. They may need to use a variety of diagnostic tools (depending on your case) but they cleverly limit the tools they use to only those that are reliable, safe and effective for detecting lyme disease. For instance, if you are suffering from neurological or neuropsychiatric symptoms of lyme disease they may perform a SPECT imaging study to further evaluate the presence of lyme disease in your brain. Lyme-literate practioners understand how lyme disease affects every cell in the body. They evaluate your health based on your total health picture and their diagnostic findings - NOT solely on the presence or absence of a bands appearance on an insensitive lyme blood test produced by a junk lab. These blood tests routinely miss obvious lyme.

Lyme-literate practioners don't wait for you to present in their office with a classic bulls eye rash, an attached and engorged tick in the center of the rash, joint pain, flu-like symptoms, fatigue and an affidavit from the tick who bit you confirming that he did in point of fact transmit lyme disease and numerous co-infections to you while you were running in the park last month. Relying solely on a blood test to determine if an ill person has lyme disease is flawed, cruel, unrealistic, dangerous, costly and sometimes deadly for lyme victims and others.

How do I know if my practioner is lyme-literate?

Lyme-literate practioners:

• Are consistently focused on improving the health of their patients without causing harm.

• Use real science when diagnosing and treating their patient’s health problems. They do not rely on self-serving, erroneous, misleading, or strategically incomplete science produced by the media, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, health insurance providers or advertisers.

• They use safe and effective diagnostic tools and treatment plans.

• They are critical thinkers and use logic in their health evaluations and treatment.

• They provide the sick with accurate health information

• They are not afraid of difficult or unusual cases and when they encounter such cases they do not automatically deny their patient is sick, blame the patient or instantly assign a mental illness diagnosis.

• They are actively involved in learning new and accurate health information and participating in continuing education programs designed to help their patients. They routinely incorporate this new information as a process improvement in the way they treat and diagnose their lyme patients. They consistently make such improvements even in cases when the improvements help to improve their patient’s health and wellness but may cause a reduction in their own business profits.

• They are tolerant of different health views points and respect their patient's health freedoms. They never respond to differing viewpoints from their patients with fear, threat, ridicule, harassment or intimidation.

• They evaluate the health of the entire person

• They save the lives of those suffering from lyme disease even if it means risking harassment, persecution and imprisonment by the ignorant and ill-informed

I welcome any comments and feedback you may have on this article. writer@sickfromatick.com