How To Do A Lyme and Tickborne Disease Awareness Event

May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month

May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month. Many areas of the US do not experience cold enough Winters for the ticks to die off. This year especially take the time to educate yourself and others about the dangers that lurk in our ticks.

10 Tips for Managing Chronic Pain at Home

10 Tips for Managing Chronic Pain at Home: 

(Advice from a Physical Therapist and Mother of Child with Lyme, ME/CFS & POTS)

Defining Pain
Most Chronic pain suffers hate rating their pain, but health care providers need to know. Sometimes we refer to the "Pain Assessment" as the 5th Vital Sign (after Temperature, Pulse, Respiratory rate, and Blood pressure). When we're treating you for pain, your rating is the only way we can gage whether a patient is making progress or not. It's more difficult when trying to quantify how much pain a child is in. I find the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) works better than telling someone to "rate your pain on a scale of 0-10."

A Negative Lyme Test Does't Exclude the Diagnosis of Borreliosis

Lyme disease, caused by the Borrelia Burgdorferi spirochete, is the most common vector borne disease in the United States. There is considerable debate regarding the accuracy of current testing for Lyme Diseaes.

Obtaining a positive confirmation for Lyme is hampered by several factors:

1. Antibodies against Borrelia burgdorferi [Bb] are slow to develop (1-4 weeks for early antibodies (IgM) & 4-6 weeks or more for mature antibodies (IgG)); 
2. Co-infection with other spirochetes can yield false positives; 
3. Co-infection with certain viruses can yield false negatives;
4. Co-infection with other tick-borne disease can yield false negatives;
5. Immunosupression (lack of antibodies) can yield false positives; 
6. Immunoblots (a test that looks for antibodies) are subject to human interpretation and error;
7. No single Enzyme Immunoassay Test (EIA) currently exists to detect all 21 strains of Borrelia; 
8. Early antibiotic use can yield false negatives;
9. Many doctors don't know the reason's for false negative tests, and fail to repeat them.