After Decades of Dismissal, Chronic Lyme Disease is Now Recognized

December 24, 2025

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/after-decades-of-dismissal-chronic-lyme-disease-is-now-getting-recognized

After Decades of Dismissal, Chronic Lyme Disease Is Now Recognized

Patients with persistent Lyme symptoms face medical limbo as federal officials and researchers debate causes, treatment, and what to call the condition.
Cara Michelle Miller
Updated:

“Like a human hockey puck”—that’s how Nikki Schultek describes a year spent ricocheting between specialists in Connecticut, each focused on one piece of her deteriorating health—bladder pain, neurological symptoms, joint pain—while missing the whole picture.

“I really don’t fault the clinicians,” she told The Epoch Times. “The training hones them to be experts in a domain.”

After her odyssey of misdiagnoses, Schultek finally received a correct diagnosis of Lyme disease. However, her experience navigating a fragmented health care system brought her to Washington on Dec. 15, where Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convened a rare federal roundtable addressing what he called long-standing failures in how the disease is diagnosed, studied, and treated.

“Lyme disease is an example of a chronic disease that has long been dismissed, with patients receiving inadequate care,” Kennedy said at the event. “I want to announce that the gaslighting of Lyme patients is over.”

The Medical Divide

Schultek’s story echoes those of many patients whose months—or years—of fatigue, pain, neurological symptoms, and cognitive problems, after undergoing a battery of tests, are eventually traced back to that one tick bite that infected them with Lyme disease.

Persistent symptoms from Lyme disease are both difficult to diagnose and treat, in part because health agencies, mainstream medicine, researchers, and patients disagree about what is causing the debilitating constellation of symptoms.

The roundtable brought together patients, clinicians, researchers, and advocates to discuss what many describe as long-standing failures in how Lyme disease is diagnosed, studied, and treated. At stake is not just terminology, but access to care.
 
(See link for article)
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**Comment**
 
Two things, right off the bat: 
 
  1. It’s going to take a whole lot more than an accurate test to fix this beast.
  2. A simple pronouncement from Kennedy is not going to stop the deeply entrenched gas-lighting of patients.
  3. I do blame doctors, public health, and institutions that ignore the Hippocratic Oath – a vow to ‘do no harm,’ and would rather turn patients away entirely or diagnose them with anything but Lyme/MSIDS, furthering their misery. 
The entire paradigm is set against patient health.  
The article falsely regurgitates that only 10% go on to suffer lingering symptoms, when microbiologist Holly Ahern puts it between 40-60% – a far cry from 10%. It also falsely states that 90% are successfully treated with a few weeks of antibiotics when research demonstrates again and again treatment failures in nearly every antibiotic study done.
 
The article doesn’t even sniff at coinfections. Reality paints a starkly different picture from what the article paints.  Most patients are sicker than dogs and infected with multiple pathogens which require entirely different drugs.  Nary a word on pleomorphism either (Bb’s ability to shapeshift and lie dormant to reemerge later).  
These issues are relevant as they make patients infinitely sicker and more complex.
Sorry – not feeling too excited about this.  Reading through the comments didn’t help either.  I saw plenty of the “if you are healthy you won’t get this,” and “take ivermectin,” or take Japanese knotweed.”  
 
If only it was that simple!

To comment, you are limited to 1500 words.  I left this comment:

Far more than 10% go onto suffer persisting symptoms because they don’t include those who are diagnosed and treated late – which is most of us: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/02/25/medical-stalemate-what-causes-continuing-symptoms-after-lyme-treatment/.

For a bird’s eye view of the entire sordid, complicated affair: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/09/25/why-should-we-care-about-lyme-disease-a-colorful-tale-of-government-conflicts-of-interest-probable-bioweaponization-and-pathogen-complexity/

How Lyme/MSIDS (multi systemic infectious disease syndrome – because Lyme is just the tip of the spear) has been handled is palpably insane. It’s going to take a whole lot more than an accurate test to fix this juggernaut. Doctors are afraid to diagnose let alone treat it: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/12/15/everything-about-lyme-disease-is-steeped-in-controversy-now-some-doctors-are-too-afraid-to-treat-patients/

My husband and I only achieved our health back after FIVE years of intensely nuanced and expensive treatment and then retreating for a few months after relapsing 3-4 times.
Not sure I’d even be writing this if it weren’t for this life-saving treatment.
It’s sexually and congenitally transmitted.

All my initial symptoms were gynecological. Remember, it’s a cousin to syphilis: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2024/12/18/letter-breaking-down-timeline-deception-of-lyme-disease-no-studies-have-ruled-out-sexual-transmission/

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If you have the time, comment after the article here:   https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/after-decades-of-dismissal-chronic-lyme-disease-is-now-getting-recognized-5960441?

 
 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing, Ticks

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