WHAT TO DO WHEN A LOVED ONE IS IN DENIAL ABOUT NEEDING HELP
Posted: February 2, 2017
When someone close to you is struggling it can be incredibly heartbreaking. Not only is it tough, but it can be even harder when that person is in denial. Unfortunately, there is a stigma associated with psychiatric illness. Your friend or loved ones could be worried that people may call them negative words or treat them differently. This prevents them from seeking help.
Treat all Problems Differently
Not all people suffering from being in denial have to do with drugs and alcohol. For instance, Dr. Daniel Amen knew a couple who had marital problems from the beginning of their marriage. The problems consisted of continuous toxic arguments and threatening to leave one another. When counseling was discussed, thoughts of embarrassment and financial excuses came to the surface from the husband. Eventually, the refusal and denial for counseling began affecting the children too.
Steps for Encouragement
Here are some suggestions to help people who are unaware of a problem or unwilling to get the help they need:
TRY USING A STRAIGHTFORWARD APPROACH:
Tell the person why their actions are concerning you.
GIVE THE LOVED ONE INFORMATION:
Good information can be very persuasive, especially if it is presented in a life-enhancing way.
PLANT CONTINUOUS SEEDS OF INFORMATION:
Remind them of good information and new articles from time-to-time. This spikes conversation and, when done in a non-abrasive way, can be beneficial.
PROTECT YOUR RELATIONSHIP TOGETHER:
Work on gaining that person’s trust and they will learn to be more receptive to your thoughts. Talk about life outside of their medical issues.
GIVE YOUR LOVED ONE NEW HOPE:
Many people who are struggling have already tried to get help and it either didn’t work or ended up making them worse. Inform your loved one of new brain technology where new treatment options could be more effective.
Enough is enough
If the person resists, you have to be able to give yourself a break and say enough is enough. If the relationship becomes negative and continuously toxic you should separate yourself. Separating yourself gets you away from the toxicity in the relationship. Also, by removing yourself from the situation, it can motivate people to change. Threatening to leave is not the first approach you should ever take. But eventually, it can definitely turn into the best approach.
Using Force Doesn’t Help
If your loved one doesn’t realize they need to change their habits, then don’t force them into a situation they are constantly resisting. The only time you can force people into treatment is when they are causing harm to themselves, others, or cannot care for themselves.
When is SPECT Brain Imaging the Answer?
At the Amen Clinics we order SPECT brain imaging studies on most of our patients when:
• We are considered someone’s “last hope”.
• We need to look into the details and see if there is something that can be identified that may have been overlooked by another professional.
• Your case is complicated, and you have not gotten better with previous treatments or providers. (In this case, a scan could be life-saving).
Keep in mind, a SPECT brain imaging study alone will not give an accurate diagnosis. However, it helps the clinicians understand the way your brain specifically functions. There are many factors that contribute to a diagnosis with a SPECT brain scan. These are a combination of clinical history, personal interviews, information from families, diagnostic checklists, SPECT studies, and other neuropsychological tests.
If your loved one is struggling and showing signs of being in denial, try planting a seed of information about breakthrough brain imaging. Contact Amen Clinics to schedule a visit, or call our Care Center at 855-474-1347.
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**Comment**
Although this article was written with only mental health in mind, many of the suggestions are also helpful for those you suspect are infected with Lyme/MSIDS, which can also have a psychological component to it.
I’m certainly no expert on any of this but I can tell you our experience:
I watched my husband languish for years. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on that would help explain his exhaustion, insomnia, pain, and personality changes. We considered chronic fatigue, diet, and things I can’t even remember. It wasn’t until I complained to a friend that I started to have hope. After listening to my husband’s symptoms, she said,
“That sounds like a page out of my book. I was just diagnosed with Lyme.”
Then I read everything I could on Lyme and even contacted local support groups, which ended up giving me the facts I needed to proceed.
Unfortunately, my husband would have none of it.
I remember trying to get him to a doctor. Nope. Wasn’t happening.
So, while I was convinced my husband had Lyme disease, he looked at me like I’d lost my mind, argued with me, and refused to do a thing.
What it took was falling down the steps.
You see he had secretly been crawling up and down the steps due to severe pain. When the entire family was out he decided to try walking normally down the steps which ended up with him flat on his back staring up at the ceiling trying to figure out if he had broken bones.
He finally accepted the fact he needed help.
I will say that people that get to this level need help from someone who is able to think logically and advocate for them. His mind was impaired, which is common with late-stage Lyme/MSIDS. He would have been fodder for mainstream doctors who are dismissing people left and right as having MUS (medically unexplained symptoms), and handing them an anti-depressant. https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/06/11/dr-eugene-shapiro-medically-unexplained-symptoms/(Video of Dr. Shapiro urging the medical community to develop ways to prevent “healthcare-seeking behaviors” by parents who believed their children may have Lyme disease.)
Each of these articles demonstrates Lyme/MSIDS’s ability to change behavior.
My husband was more aggressive, given to outbursts, couldn’t handle any amount of stress, cried all the time, struggled with insecurity, had hallucinations & nightmares he couldn’t distinguish from reality, and continually worried and accused me of infidelity. At the time I took it all personally as I was uneducated about infectiously-driven psychiatric issues.
We were one of the fortunate ones in that we purposely went to an “out of the box” practitioner with an open mind. She still tested him with the abysmal 2-tiered CDC testing but when that came back negative, did an inflammation marker test which showed severe wide-spread inflammation. I’ll never forget her words:
By that point I had learned the horrific details of the way this has been handled by “authorities” and that we needed a practitioner trained by ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society). By that time I had full-blown symptoms as well.
Fluorescent Image of Borrelia, the Causative Agent of Lyme Disease.
Click on link for picture. Permission granted by Dr. Benjamin L. Clark, University of Minnesota Medical School, Director, Bridges to the Baccalaureate Degree Program, Director, Pathways to Advance Degrees in the Life Sciences, 218-726-6587
Green is the intracellular Borrelia, blue-purple is the nucleus of the macrophage, a type of white blood cell of the immune system that is supposed to engulf and digest pathogens and anything else considered a foreign invader.
The red is a cell surface marker (CD86) known as Cluster of Differentiation 86, a protein expressed on antigen-presenting cells that provides costimulatory signals necessary for T cell activation and survival. It is the ligand for two different proteins on the T cell surface: CD28 and CTLA-4. CD86 works in tandem with CD80 to prime T cells. Co-stimulation is an essential step in the induction of adaptive immune responses.
There are probably 4 or more spirochetes in the phagosome (a vacuolewithin a phagocytethatcontainsbacteria or otheringestedparticlesthatbecomesfusedwith a lysosome which functions as the digestive system of the cell).
Dr. Clarke’s future work will be to study that internal chamber and how the spirochete potentially thrives.
When it is proven & accepted that Bb infects white blood cells, it will give a potential answer to some late-disseminated Lyme cases as an immune-deficiency syndrome demonstrating why some patients have frequent and prolonged infections and may acquire new allergies as well as Mast Cell issues.
I opened a file drawer and pulled out 12.4 pounds of medical records organized in two large binders. Tucked inside the top binder’s front pocket was a grainy photo of my husband and me sitting on a misty beach on a small island near Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. My husband, slim and fit, smiled at the camera, blissfully ignorant of what was about to happen. Our two sons, 10 and 12 years old, were just out of the camera’s range, playing in the surf. There was a date stamp burned into the lower right corner of the photo that said July 22, 2002.
This was our last day of perfect health.
Courtesy of Kris Newby
What followed was years of misery that started after my husband and I were bitten by unseen ticks. My tick had secretly buried itself at the back of my head, creating a chronically weeping lesion, a tick bite granuloma, that a year later would have to be surgically removed. My husband never figured out where he was bitten. Eventually, we both tested positive for Lyme disease bacteria and malaria-like Babesia parasites. While most tick-borne diseases can be cured with an early dose of inexpensive antimicrobial drugs, the delays in our treatment resulted in a chronic condition, and we joined the estimated 1 million to 3 million people in the US who suffer from persistent Lyme disease symptoms.
I was an engineer trained to solve complex problems and a science writer by profession, so as soon as I was diagnosed, I began reading everything I could about Lyme disease. It quickly became clear that there was a puzzling gap between how the medical establishment viewed the disease and how it was experienced by tick-bitten patients.
The academic researchers who wrote the clinical guidelines for Lyme disease said it was easy to diagnose, treat, and cure. Lyme patients insisted that the tests and symptom lists were inaccurate and that the recommended treatment — a short course of antibiotics — wasn’t curing the disease in all cases. In the face of all these contradictions, I started searching for answers, and along the way I produced a documentary and a book that explored these issues.
Bottom line: The tick-borne disease problem is much more serious and widespread than most people realize, with reported cases of Lyme disease tripling in the United States since the late 1990s. Based on more than a decade of research, I believe our medical system is structurally designed to marginalize and misdiagnose tick-borne disease patients.
The slide into a mysterious illness
A week after my husband and I returned to California from Martha’s Vineyard, we both experienced horrible flu-like symptoms. I was so weak, I had to crawl up to my second-floor bedroom. We went together to see the doctor on call at our community clinic. I told her about our Martha’s Vineyard vacation and suggested that we might have Lyme disease. She dismissed the idea and told us we probably had a virus and that we should come back if symptoms got worse. The next week, we returned to her office sicker than the week before. She still thought it was a virus, but she gave us a referral to see an infectious diseases specialist.
We couldn’t get an appointment with the specialist until December 5 — more than five months after leaving Martha’s Vineyard. During our 10-minute appointment, I told him about the Lyme problem on the island, but he wouldn’t test for it for reasons he didn’t explain. Instead, he tested us for parvovirus and gave us three weeks of a drug called iodoquinol to treat for possible intestinal parasites.
This drug gave us the first relief from symptoms since our vacation, but once the course ended, our symptoms returned more serious than ever, with waxing and waning combinations of exhaustion, brain fog, constipation, explosive diarrhea, head/neck/muscle aches, traveling nerve pain, twitches, blurry vision, light and sound sensitivity, loss of time/place/self, and the inability to read, write, or carry out the cognitive tasks required for daily living.
In January, I called the infectious diseases doctor in tears, begging for more antibiotics, but he refused, saying, “We can’t treat you based on a positive response to drugs.” Then he said he thought we were suffering from a “psychosomatic couples thing.”
I decided to look for another doctor. It was May — 10 months after our trip — before we could get an appointment with two infectious diseases doctors at a nearby academic medical center. They ordered an array of tests, including one for Lyme disease. All the tests came back negative except for my Lyme test. My husband’s Lyme test came back negative. The doctor said my test was a false positive and he was going to ignore it.The younger of the two doctors told us that the odds of us both getting Lyme disease would be like winning the lottery. Then the more senior doctor fired us as patients, saying that he didn’t have the tools to treat people like us.He recommended that we seek counseling for depression.
At this point, I was so incapacitated that I had to shut down my tech marketing business. My husband, a Silicon Valley engineer, went to work sick every day because we needed his employer health insurance. We realized that we might never recover. And in the middle of the night, our inflamed brains churned on one thought, never spoken aloud: What will happen to our boys?
With the first solid lead in our case in 10 months, a positive Lyme test, we found a reputable doctor who specialized in tick-borne diseases through a Lyme support group, and we started down the road to recovery.
The obstacles to getting diagnosed for Lyme disease
It took 10 doctors, a year, and $60,000 to finally diagnose our two serious tick-borne diseases. By then our microbial invaders were deeply entrenched in our brains and tissues. It took another six years of on-and-off antimicrobial treatments to return to health. Because of lost wages and medical expenses not covered by insurance, we burned through our savings and our sons’ college funds. We had to take out a home equity loan to make ends meet.
Yet I consider us among the lucky Lyme patients. Unlike many of the hundreds of patients I encountered during the filming and promotion of the Under Our Skin documentary, we were able to return to work. We’ve been doing well for years. My recent interviews show that even now, years after our ordeal and with Lyme cases increasing, patients still face obstacles in getting diagnosed.
Based on my book and film research, I believe that the root cause of the Lyme misdiagnosis problem is the persistent mythology that the disease is overdiagnosed and that the testing is accurate. The chief proponents of this point of view recently published “Lyme Disease in 2018,” a Viewpoint essay in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. Throughout the essay, the authors minimize the impact of the Lyme problem, and in the abstract, they say
“there has not been a statistically significant increase in the number of reported cases of Lyme disease in the United States during the most recent 4 years (2013-2016) for which data are available.”
This is in stark contrast to the April 2019 statement on Lyme disease from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said Lyme is spreading rapidly into new geographical areas and that “Tickborne diseases increasingly threaten the health of people in the United States.” While most Lyme cases are concentrated in the northeastern and north central states, there are reported cases of Lyme in all 50 states today. In 2017, there were almost 60,000 cases of tick-borne diseases reported to the CDC.
The scientists at the CDC who study the spread of diseases now say, “Reported cases capture only a fraction of the overall number of people with tickborne illnesses.” The CDC is “unclear” on the reasons behind the rapid spread of ticks and related diseases, though they cite change in land use and climate patterns as important factors.
As we found out the hard way, ticks spread many other diseases, many of them deadly, and the symptoms of mixed tick-borne diseases — Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, and Lyme disease, to name a few — are not well documented in the medical literature. Spotted fever can send people into a coma within 14 days. Babesiosis, a red blood cell infection, can be fatal for people with damaged or missing spleens. If Lyme disease is not treated promptly, it can lead to life-threatening cardiac manifestations and chronic neurological problems. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how our whack-a-mole mix of symptoms, especially the brain inflammation and pain, unmeasurable and invisible to physicians, made us seem like hypochondriacs.
Few physicians realize that the recommended two-tiered Lyme disease testing protocol is outdated and inaccurate. One 2007 study in the British Medical Journal found that the protocol missed “88 of every 200 patients with Lyme disease.” Another UK meta-analysis of Lyme test kits, published in the International Journal of General Medicine on November 18, 2016, concluded: “An important clinical implication of our conclusion that current Lyme testing lacks sensitivity is that many genuine cases of LB [Lyme borreliosis] may be underdiagnosed.”
Rather than measuring for the physical presence of the Lyme microbe, the commonly used tests rely on the measurement of a body’s antibody response to the microbe. So a Lyme-infected person might test negative in the first month of infection if their immune system hasn’t produced enough antibodies to be measured. Or, in my husband’s case, if the antibodies at the time of testing were tied up fighting Babesia, the Lyme antibody test might read negative. After his germ load was lowered by a short course of antibiotics, he tested antibody-positive for both of his tick-borne diseases.
A better approach to testing would be to screen blood for specific DNA markers of several tick-borne diseases in one run, but it will take time for these tests to move from the research labs to clinical use.
What to do if you’re bitten by a tick
People ask me what they should do to avoid what my husband and I went through. I tell them that prevention should always be a top priority: pulling socks up over pant legs, spraying repellent on clothing, and doing daily tick checks. Still, sometimes ticks, with skills honed over 120 million years of evolution, slip past those defenses.
Ticks are sewers of infection that can transmit multiple species of disease-carrying organisms into your bloodstream in a matter of hours (though your chances of getting Lyme disease are low if a tick is attached to you for 36 hours or less, according to the CDC). Once a tick taps into a blood vessel, it releases chemicals that suppress the immune system for a week or more, giving the germs a dangerous head start. So if you suspect you may have acquired a tick-borne disease, your number one goal should be to start treatment as soon as possible.
If you capture the tick that bit you, send it to a lab that will analyze it for its microbial hitchhikers. The Bay Area Lyme Foundation will test ticks for free using advanced techniques at the University of Northern Arizona. It’s not fast, but by sending in your tick, you are participating in a citizen science project to track the spread of ticks and associated diseases. Ask your doctor if you can start taking antibiotics while you wait for results. If you have a rash, take a picture of it next to a ruler so you can see if it expands over time, a sign that you have Lyme disease. Know that the testing on the tick is not foolproof — both positive and negative results can be misleading — so keep an eye out for symptoms no matter what the results are.
Find a doctor experienced in treating tick-borne diseases. If you had a brain tumor, you’d probably seek out a doctor with lots of experience treating that specific type of cancer. The best way to find physicians trained in treating complex tick-borne diseases is to contact the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, a nonprofit organization that can send you a list of practitioners in your area. Don’t waste valuable treatment time trying to convince an inexperienced physician that you’re really sick. Find an expert who knows which drugs are most effective for each of the tick co-infections and in what order to treat them.
Treatment for Lyme is too often delayed — but hope is on the horizon
As I was writing this story, I showed the 2002 beach photo to my husband and asked him what he thought of the couple in it, us, 17 years ago.
“Naive,” he said.
“If you could turn back time, would you do it?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
Now that I’m on the other side of my tick-borne illnesses, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help others avoid the ordeal that my family went through. Here I offer up my personal story as a burnt offering, a cautionary tale, in the hopes that others might avoid the mistakes we made.
The reasons behind the misinformation associated with tick-borne diseases are multifaceted and complex. One of the primary reasons Lyme disease has been ignored by the pharmaceutical industry, a force for good in other diseases, is that there’s no money in it — the cure is an early dose of off-patent, cheap antibiotics. While there’s a profit potential with a Lyme vaccine (one is in development in France), it offers no protection against other serious tick-borne diseases, so it may never be widely adopted. With no accurate diagnostics on the market, Lyme patients are often misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, or irritable bowel syndrome. So for pharma companies, the real money is in treating the daily symptoms of chronic Lyme disease — pain, depression, and inflammation — with lucrative blockbuster drugs.
There is no medical insurance reimbursement code for chronic Lyme disease. Medical insurance companies are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs, and labeling chronic Lyme as a “syndrome” rather than a legitimate disease gives them grounds to deny the expensive ongoing care costs of these very sick patients.
Bunny Woloszczak of Hurleyville, New York, places protest signs at the Capitol Reflecting Pool as part of a rally to foster awareness about Lyme disease May 19, 2016, in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A close examination of the backstory of Lyme disease shows other factors that have corrupted the foundational science of Lyme disease. In Under Our Skin, I explain how researchers’ financial interests in vaccines and test kits may have negatively influenced the original definition and diagnostic recommendations for Lyme disease. In my book Bitten, I explore evidence that suggests the initial Lyme outbreak was caused by a bioweapons release of an organism that was left out of scientific publications. This book, a call to action for researchers, asks the question,
“Could an unacknowledged human-engineered microbe be contributing to the confusing set of symptoms that tick-bit patients are experiencing today?”
This leaves us with a medical system that is structurally designed to delay treatment and do harm to tick-borne disease patients.
But there is hope on the horizon.
This year, the CDC announced that it will improve its passive system for tracking tick-borne diseases by funding a more coordinated national surveillance program. And there are a few companies and universities working on more accurate, faster diagnostics for all the tick-borne diseases. But these structural fixes won’t be done anytime soon.
In the meantime, the best advice I have to offer is to take charge of your health care. Do your research before you go to the clinic, and find a physician who will be open-minded about the real risks of tick-borne diseases. Realize that you might have to fight to be tested and to be treated with protocols that will restore your health.
So thankful for Kris Newby and all she’s done for the Lyme/MSIDS community.
Please note the horrific way she and her husband were treated by doctors.Unbelievable – except this story plays out again and again and again. Time for doctors to wake up and treat this with the attention it deserves.
Please note,
“A close examination of the backstory of Lyme disease shows other factors that have corrupted the foundational science of Lyme disease. In Under Our Skin, I explain how researchers’ financial interests in vaccines and test kits may have negatively influenced the original definition and diagnostic recommendations for Lyme disease. In my book Bitten, I explore evidence that suggests the initial Lyme outbreak was caused by a bioweapons release of an organism that was left out of scientific publications. This book, a call to action for researchers, asks the question,
‘Could an unacknowledged human-engineered microbe be contributing to the confusing set of symptoms that tick-bit patients are experiencing today?'”
YET…..
“The CDC is “unclear” on the reasons behind the rapid spread of ticks and related diseases, though they cite change in land use and climate patterns as important factors.”
Erroneous research by Ontario public officials completely ignores and dismisses previous published work and instead creates their own reality to show a gradual tick expansion northward due to supposed climate change.
The problem is tick populations already existed in those locations. Scott’s most telling statement for patients to be aware of regarding research on climate change and ticks is this theory would,
“explain to the public a reason for not tackling this serious health care issue earlier. The tick problem was programmed for the future. Thus, ill-founded statistical analyses culminated in fabricated erroneous data and, ultimately, resulted in a series of maps that turned out to be flawed science.”
Although conspiracy theorists have suggested — falsely — that Lyme disease was created in a U.S. military lab, it is true that in the years following World War II, the U.S. employed top German scientists who explored the tick’s potential in biological warfare for Nazi Germany. The researchers were investigating the tick’s ability to spread pathogens across wide areas with the potential to incapacitate entire populations.
Seventy-five years later, the tick timebomb is detonating on its own. Thanks to climate change, globalization, and other factors, ticks are not only proliferating but also becoming more malignant, more aggressive, and more likely to carry infection. A public health crisis is hiding in plain sight,
It’s far easier to blame the climate & land usage than it is to look inside government experiments gone awry.
Lyme Disease Cases Are Exploding. And It’s Only Going to Get Worse.
Climate change and human sprawl have triggered a pandemic
By Alex Bhattacharji
This story is part of “Tickpocalypse,” a multi-part special report.
Kelly Oggenfuss is walking into the woods. Leading her team of four young researchers through a thicket of slender oak trees, she doles out assignments by letters corresponding to a grid. As early morning light filters through the canopy, Oggenfuss and her colleagues pull on latex gloves then disperse to gather surveillance data.
Please see link for entire article.
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**Comment**
Glad they mentioned “co-feeding” and the probability they are spreading more pathogens into us more quickly, increasing prevalence.
Glad they state this is a pandemic and the increase of ticks is everywhere making maps a joke. Throw them away. They’ve been used against patients from the get-go.
Although Lyme disease has been around forever, tinkering with it in a lab and making it more pathogenic isn’t a “theory,” it’s what bioweaponization means, and it’s far more than just Lyme. I’d say the experiment has been highly successful.
They briefly mention the role of birds but fail once again by bringing the climate into it. Out of one side of their mouth they state ticks are marvelous ecoadaptors and then out of the other side of their mouth they blame the climate. You can’t have it both ways.Please note the DOD, DARPA, & the EPA are funding the supposed “link” between ticks & climate change….that is quite telling. They would rather blame the weather than take responsibility for tweaking ticks in a lab that perhaps gave them the ability to live on stucco & in dirt and be more aggressive….hmmm. Yeah, blame the climate.
Having the EM rash is highly variable from 25%-80%. It should not be used as criteria for entrance into research studies nor as a required sign by doctors for diagnosis as so many do not get it. If you do have it – you have Lyme, but if you don’t, you could still have Lyme.
“The authorities have been using tick expansion and climate change to get research dollars. Climate change is a popular topic right now, and that is a great source of funding for related research. However, any research on ticks and climate change is inconclusive––in essence, there is no validity. The long-range, futuristic projections and statistical models are bogus science because blacklegged ticks have already been found in northern Canada. In fact, we documented blacklegged ticks on migratory songbirds in northern Alberta dating back to 1998. Any allocation of government funding for ticks and climate change research is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. It will not help Lyme disease patients one iota.” John Scott
Ouch.
An independent Canadian researcher who doesn’t have strings attached to his work points out all the marionettes on strings in the research world, who by the way, refuse to even acknowledge his work…..and even advocates are guilty of jumping on a Bandwagon built upon faulty science.
Let us never stoop as low as the enemy who has twisted science to suit their purpose from the beginning.
Lastly, please note the TBDWG has taken a supposed new turn and is leaving patients out of the process. Is this really shocking when you read the above issues?
. . .I am a biologist, so that’s where I started working on ticks and mosquitoes—how to produce a lot of them. Drop them out of airplanes. Everything was very hush-hush, very secret. I’m still leery talking about it, because I think they might put me in jail because I’m delivering secrets. [Laughs.] It was a crazy time.
We would run all kinds of distribution tests on where these things go when you release them and what were the factors that would cause the migration. Can we drop them out of airplanes and how do we get the bugs to the enemy? That was the thing we did. – James Oliver
Lyme disease and dental health: What you need to know
Lyme disease, also known as Lyme borreliosis, is caused by the tick-borne spirochete bacterium Borrelia burgdorfer.
Lyme disease is a multisystem inflammatory disease, and neurologic, articular, and cardiac manifestations may follow untreated early infection. While the B. burgdorferi bacterium does not make toxins or cause direct tissue damage, local inflammation results from host response mechanisms.
Three phases of general clinical manifestations
Early localized: distinct, bull’s eye or target skin lesions in warm areas of the body (groin, axilla or belt line) that may itch, burn or hurt.
Early disseminated: if treatment is not initiated involvement of brain or heart may occur.
Late disease: also called as Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS), this phase leads to muscle and bone involvement.
The link between Lyme disease and dental health
It has been observed that Lyme and many other chronic diseases are fed by the unique bacteria that develop in root canals and where teeth have been extracted. Lyme bacteria exists in the teeth, not in the enamel. The spirochete bacterium love to occupy in the dentin and some three miles of tiny tubules.
Its clinical manifestations may include facial and dental pain (tooth ache), facial nerve palsy, headache, temporomandibular (jaw) joint pain, and masticatory (chewing) muscle pain. The effects that can precipitate when performing dental procedures on a patient with Lyme disease must also be considered. 1
Symptoms of oral presentations
Symptoms associated with Lyme disease include headache and facial pain that often mimics dental pathology and temporomandibular (such as TMJ) disorders.
Other oral symptoms can be:
Dry mouth
Tooth sensitivity
Pulpitis, or the oral inflammation of dental pulp
Bell’s palsy, or partial facial paralysis
Cranial nerve palsy may occur in early disseminated disease. Bell’s palsy is a form of usually temporary facial neuropathy resulting from inflammation/damage to the seventh cranial nerve (i.e., facial nerve)
Involvement of the saliva producing glands may manifest as brief inflammation of the gland
Getting the right treatment
Because Lyme bacteria resides in the mouth, the disease can cause tooth pain unrelated to cavities or any other dental issues, which might indicate Lyme disease to your dentist. However, the misdiagnosis of any of these symptoms by a dental professional could result in unnecessary procedures, like root canals. Knowing the above oral symptoms can help a patient identify Lyme disease early.
Fortunately, oral symptoms will disappear after a successful treatment. That doesn’t mean you should drop your guard though. Another tick bite could mean another bout of Lyme disease. People who have been bitten by a tick or who live in tick infested regions should take these oral symptoms and other symptoms of Lyme disease seriously.
If a patient is worried about contracting Lyme disease, he/she should visit a medical care provider and dental hygienist to check the mouth for indications of Lyme.
References
Lyme disease: considerations for dentistry. J Orofac Pain. 1996 Winter;10(1):74-86.
Lyme disease awareness for the New Jersey dentist. A survey of orofacial and headache complaints associated with Lyme disease. J N J Dent Assoc. 1998 Winter;69(1):19, 21, 62-3 passim.
Lyme disease: College of Dental Hygienists of Ontario
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**Comment**
Lyme disease is not just an inflammatory disease. Let us never forget it is bacterial but also often viral, fungal, and parasitical due to the coinfection involvement in many cases. While these pathogens cause widespread inflammation, it should never be treated solely as inflammatory – which would only be a bandaid on an infectious disease that requires antimicrobials.
Many never go through the three “phases” or “stages” of Lyme or if they do, they can be in any order. The EM rash is often absent.
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 