Mr. Jim Wilson, of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, wrote a letter to the editor of Oxford Journals’ Clinical Infectious Diseases entitled “Concerns Regarding the Infectious Diseases Society of America Lyme Disease Clinical Practice Guidelines.” This letter was dated April 2007. Unfortunately not much has changed in the eyes of the policy makers or health practitioners since then, even though the same inconsistencies and the same oversights are ever present regarding Lyme disease.
Here is an excerpt from Mr. Wilson’s letter:
Late-stage Lyme disease is very poorly defined. Arthritic and neurologic manifestations have been mentioned, but are not well linked to the various symptoms that coexist with them. It is this array of variable symptoms, which often occur in the absence of arthritis or classic neurological manifestations, that collectively are so disabling in terms of quality of life for the patient and so costly for governments in terms of disability payments. The guidelines [1] refer to many of these symptoms as “the aches and pains of daily living” (p. 1115); however, no research has been presented that has had the specific design of determining all of the symptoms of late-stage Lyme disease. Symptoms such as overwhelming fatigue, pain, muscle dysfunction, cognitive dysfunction, psychiatric issues, breathing restrictions, eyesight and hearing problems, bowel dysfunction, and other manifestations that can be objectively measured, if proper measuring tools are employed, are common to late Lyme disease. Labeling these as “the aches and pains of daily living,” or as a “post-Lyme disease syndrome” (p. 1116) is a travesty at worst and is premature at best. Many symptoms have been discounted; in the guidelines [1], entire classes of potential therapies are disregarded because of this poor recognition of symptoms.
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