
Kris Kristofferson's Lyme Disease Misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's (2016) - adsfqwop
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed-alzheimers-has-lyme-disease/
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gambler
It's scary how hard it is to get quality diagnosis and how stubborn the
medical establishment is in maintaining the current status quo. We have
treatments for many diseases. We know the symptoms. But because your physician
might not know about something, you might need to pinball between specialists
(losing time and money) or even not properly get diagnosed at all.

A free web-based expert system for medical diagnostics could save _a lot_ of
lives. It's really something that should be tackled by the government (because
of liability issue).

Instead, we have shitty scaremongering websites that list similar symptoms for
most diseases, don't give any probabilities, don't tell you what tests are
available and instead tell you to "contact your physician".

~~~
caraffle
Of course we have treatments and symptoms for many diseases. But many diseases
present the same way. In fact many symptoms are a result of immune response,
so naturally they are going to be difficult to differentiate. It's not because
the physician doesn't know something. Further, a web based system would limit
the amount of information a physician could get and be subject to the
reporting of a lay person.

Overtreatment and overdiagnosis is also a thing. How would you like receiving
thousands of dollars of testing every time you visited the doc?

There will be bad docs like in any field but its presumptuous to think most
don't know what they're doing.

~~~
gambler
_> Further, a web based system would limit the amount of information a
physician could get and be subject to the reporting of a lay person._

I'm talking about an expert system. You enter symptoms. It asks you questions.
Then it says something "there a high probability you have X and medium
probability you have Y".

~~~
caraffle
And a physical exam? Who's going to listen to your lungs and heart, check out
your throat, ears, nose, eyes? Those are invaluable in diagnosing even the
most common illnesses.

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wyldfire
> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he
> was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or
> seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful.
> It was apparent."

I can't tell if this is a subtle joke or an egregious editing failure.

~~~
selimthegrim
It’s an entirely different kind of flying... altogether.

~~~
wyldfire
"It’s an entirely different kind of flying"

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nickysielicki
If you live in the Northeast or Midwest, unless you spend zero time in the
woods (and you shouldn't, because the woods are great), you _will_ get a deer
tick on you at some point, and it might carry lyme.

My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks.
The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a
pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick correctly (do not
crush his body), then crush a pill and make a paste, which you should apply
topically.

If you wait to see a rash, you've waited too long. If you wait until you feel
sick a few weeks later, you've waited too long. There are studies that report
the rash appears only about half the time, and the blood tests are inaccurate
for the first month or so after exposure.

~~~
nate_meurer
At least one study [1] finds topical doxycycline to be useless for
prophylactic treatment of lyme. Do you have any evidence supporting its use?

1 -
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910720/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910720/)

~~~
oblongx
I know my infectious disease doctor told me to take a one day oral dose as a
prophylactic treatment after you pull off the tick.

~~~
nate_meurer
That has nothing to do with its topical application. Drugs that perform well
via one route are often ineffective via the other. According to the study I
linked, that appears to be case here.

~~~
oblongx
Right, pretty sure we agree on that one. I thought I was backing you up,
suppose I should have replied to parent comment instead...

~~~
nate_meurer
My bad, I misread it as a bit of a counterpoint.

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Arete314159
Back before antibiotics, they used to call syphilis "The Great Imitator." The
disease, caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria known as a spirochete, could cause
so many different kinds of problems it seemed like 10 diseases in one.

Genetically, Lyme Disease is very close to syphilis. It's also a spirochete,
and it is the new "Great Imitator." (1) The main difficult thing about Lyme
Disease is that the tests for it currently are not that good. There are a lot
of false positives / negatives, and there is no test that show whether a
patient has been cured, only whether they've ever been infected.

Neurological Lyme aka neuroborreliosis can cause a number of neurological /
psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms like OCD. Doctors never check for
Lyme when a patient presents with sudden onset psych problems, even though
it's a known cause.

TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your
other tests.

(1) interesting side note -- there are some studies that suggest it can also
be sexually transmitting and/or transmitted from mother to child

~~~
crankylinuxuser
> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to
> your other tests.

Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme
without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False
positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.

~~~
bin0
If you've got a case bad enough to cause mysterious problems, it's a very bad
idea to "just nuke it". Firstly, die-off reactions are a concern. Secondly,
the treatment can be very serious (i.v. antibiotics in many cases). Thirdly,
antibiotics are not really _healthy_ , though not horribly. However, with the
growing body of research surrounding the issue of gut health and its impacts,
I'm not sure I'd want to take antibiotics without being sure.

With respect to false positives/negatives, use the igenex test. If you get a
good doctor, he'll know how to interpret the results better; you can have high
results in certain bands which the CDC does not usually consider relevant but
which can still be indicative.

All that aside, no responsible doc "just gives you the drugs". Let's not
forget there are a thousand things it could be; just giving the drugs for all
would probably kill you. Also, _that 's how we end up with resistant
bacteria_.

~~~
papln
"die-off" seems plausible, but why are all the web-search results for "die-
off" showing minor blogs and snake-oil stores, and _none_ of the big medical
sites like mayo, webmd, healthline, or mainstream news sites?

~~~
oblongx
Terminology
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarisch%E2%80%93Herxheimer_rea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarisch%E2%80%93Herxheimer_reaction)

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charlieflowers
This typo in the article is too coincidental:

> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he
> was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or
> seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful.
> It was apparent."

------
hudibras
The headline on that magazine cover is pretty evil: "Kris Kristofferson's
Miracle Recovery from Alzheimer's Diagnosis"

~~~
throwanem
It's a supermarket tabloid, albeit of the glossier, narrower sort. Like any
parasite that relies on host interest to achieve reproductive success, being
covered in evil lies is literally its one job.

