Archive for the ‘Lyme’ Category

Medical Detective: How Will I Know If I have Lyme Disease?

https://www.lymedisease.org/medical-detective-how-will-i-know-if-i-have-lyme-disease/

MEDICAL DETECTIVE: How Will I Know If I Have Lyme Disease?

This article was originally posted on Dr. Richard Horowitz’s Medical Detective Substack. You can find more helpful content by subscribing to it here.

Lyme Disease. The Great Imitator. Unless you found a tick on your body, you might not even know you were infected! 

Fortunately, a Medical Detective like me can find clues that you’ve got Lyme even without a blood test. How? There are classic signs and symptoms that are specific to the infection, and help differentiate it from other chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal, and/or neuropsychiatric illnesses.

I listened to these symptoms every day for decades from my 13,000 chronically ill patients, and then decided to create a personalized questionnaire to capture the full scope of their symptoms. Trying to remember them all, including the frequency and intensity,  would otherwise have been a daunting task, not to mention a time-intensive one for a busy physician!

The beauty of this questionnaire is that it ensures I am capturing the broad range of Lyme symptoms, not to mention asking other questions which help me suspect whether someone might also have a parasitic infection, Babesia, making their symptoms worse.

I developed this questionnaire for my first book (published in 2014) and have updated it since. I hope you find it helpful. You can use this questionnaire with confidence, giving you a solid pre-test probability of whether you suffer from chronic Lyme disease, or not.

The full study proving the accuracy of the questionnaire can be found in the International Journal of General Medicine published in 2017. Let’s get started.

The Medical Detective’s Lyme/MSIDS Questionnaire 

Before you start:

All of the points on the list in Section 1 are symptoms that can be seen with Lyme disease. However, they are not just specific to Lyme and can be found in many other diseases as well.

Sections 2 and 3 ask about signs and symptom complexes most associated with Lyme and MSIDS (Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome—much more on that to come), which I have compiled after examining thousands of patients in my practice over the years.

Section 4 is based on 2 of the 4 questions in the Healthy Days Core Module used by the CDC to track population trends nationally and identify healthcare disparities. It will help you identify the frequency of your physical and mental health problems in the previous month.

Think about how you’ve been feeling over the previous month and how often you’ve been bothered by any of the following problems. Then answer the following questions as honestly as possible, with symptom frequency and/or severity. (When we validated the questionnaire, both ways of asking the questions were able to determine the likelihood of Lyme and associated diseases.)

SECTION 1. SYMPTOM FREQUENCY AND/OR SEVERITY

SCORE:

0 – Never/Not applicable

1 – Sometimes (or mild symptoms)

2 – Most of the time (or moderate symptoms)

3 – All the time (or severe symptoms)

  2. Unexplained fevers, sweats, chills, or flushing
  3. Unexplained weight change; loss or gain
  4. Fatigue, tiredness
  5. Unexplained hair loss
  6. Swollen glands
  7. Sore throat
  8. Testicular or pelvic pain
  9. Unexplained menstrual irregularity
  10. Unexplained breast milk production; breast pain
  11. Irritable bladder or bladder dysfunction
  12. Sexual dysfunction or loss of libido
  13. Upset stomach
  14. Change in bowel function (constipation or diarrhea)
  15. Chest pain or rib soreness
  16. Shortness of breath or cough
  17. Heart palpitations, pulse skips, heart block
  18. History of a heart murmur or valve prolapse
  19. Joint pain or swelling
  20. Stiffness of the neck or back
  21. Muscle pain or cramps
  22. Twitching of the face or other muscles
  23. Headaches
  24. Neck cracks or neck stiffness
  25. Tingling, numbness, burning, or stabbing sensations
  26. Facial paralysis (Bell’s palsy)
  27. Eyes/vision: double, blurry
  28. Ears/hearing: buzzing, ringing, ear pain
  29. Increased motion sickness, vertigo
  30. Lightheadedness, poor balance, difficulty walking
  31. Tremors
  32. Confusion, difficulty thinking
  33. Difficulty with concentration or reading
  34. Forgetfulness, poor short- term memory
  35. Disorientation: getting lost; going to wrong places
  36. Difficulty with speech or writing
  37. Mood swings, irritability, depression
  38. Disturbed sleep: too much, too little, early awakening
  39. Exaggerated symptoms or worse hangover from alcohol

Tally your answers and record your score. Score: _________________

SECTION 2. MOST COMMON LYME SYMPTOMS 

SCORE:

If you rated a 3 for all the following symptoms in section 1, give yourself 5 additional points:

  • Fatigue
  • Forgetfulness, poor short- term memory
  • Joint pain or swelling
  • Tingling, numbness, burning, or stabbing sensations
  • Disturbed sleep: too much, too little, early awakening

Score: __________________

SECTION 3. LYME INCIDENCE 

SCORE:

Circle the points for each of the following statements you agree with:

    1. You’ve had a tick bite with no rash or flulike symptoms. 3 points
    2. You’ve had a tick bite, an erythema migrans (bullseye), or an undefined rash, followed by flulike symptoms. 5 points
    3. You live in what is considered a Lyme-endemic area. 2 points
    4. You have a family member who has been diagnosed with Lyme and/or other tick-borne infections. 1 point
    5. You experience migratory muscle pain. 4 points
    6. You experience migratory joint pain. 4 points
    7. You experience tingling/burning/numbness that migrates and/or comes and goes.  4 points
    8. You’ve received a prior diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. 3 points
    9. You’ve received a prior diagnosis of a specific autoimmune disorder (lupus, MS, or rheumatoid arthritis), or of a nonspecific autoimmune disorder. 3 points
    10. You’ve had a positive Lyme test, such as an immunofluorescent assay (IFA), ELISA, Western blot, PCR, lymphocyte transformation tests (LTT and/ or ELISPOT), and/or borrelia culture. 5 points

Score: __________________

SECTION 4. OVERALL HEALTH SCORE 

  1. Thinking about your overall physical health, for how many of the past 30 days was your physical health not good?

SCORE:

Give yourself the following points based on the total number of days:

0–5 days = 1 point

6–12 days = 2 points

13–20 days = 3 points

21–30 days = 4 points

Score: __________________

  1. Thinking about your overall mental health, for how many of the past 30 days was your mental health not good?

SCORE:

Give yourself the following points based on the total number of days:

0–5 days = 1 point

6–12 days = 2 points

13–20 days = 3 points

21–30 days = 4 points

Score: __________________

TOTAL SCORING

Record your total scores for each section and add them together for your final score:

*Under 25 You are not likely to have a tick-borne disorder.

*Between 25-44 It is possible you have a tick-borne disorder.

*Between 45-62 It is probable you have a tick-borne disorder.

*63 or more There is a high probability of a tick-borne disorder.

*Anyone scoring over 25 should see a healthcare provider for further evaluation. The higher your score, the more urgently you should get evaluated. I can tell you that verified Lyme patients at different stages of treatment scored an average of 59. An online survey of people who self-reported “suffering Lyme now” scored, on average, 89.

Six More Classic Lyme Disease Signs to Watch For

(I wrote about these symptoms in the previous post, but here’s a refresher.)

  1. You have more than one symptom.
  2. You have good days and bad days. A hallmark of Lyme disease is that the symptoms tend to come and go, without you doing anything differently to bring on the symptoms, which can be very confusing.
  3. The pain changes and moves around the body. Muscle and joint pain, as well as the tingling, numbness, stabbing, and burning sensations (otherwise known as neuropathy) not only tend to come and go, but they are often migratory.  For example, you have joint pain in your knees on Monday, pain in your shoulders on Thursday, and pain in your ankles on Saturday. The same symptoms can happen with Lyme neuropathy, where the bacteria that have affected your nerves cause the tingling, numbness, stabbing and burning sensations to migrate to different areas. Lyme disease is the only disorder known in medicine to cause migratory nerve pain, so if you suffer from this particular symptom, it is highly likely that you suffer from Lyme! Since many of our patients also have an overlapping co-infection with different Bartonella species, if you happen to suffer from particularly severe neuropathic symptoms, Bartonella should be suspected along with Lyme disease.
  4. If you’re a woman, your symptoms worsen right before, during, or after your menstrual cycle. Lyme disease symptoms are known to change with fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone.
  5. Your symptoms improve when you’re taking medication for other ailments. Patients taking antibiotics for an unrelated problem (such as upper respiratory or urinary tract infection) will often report that their symptoms are much better while taking the antibiotic, and worsen when the antibiotic is stopped. Conversely, some individuals feel much worse on antibiotics, where all of their symptoms are intensified. This is called a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, where the Lyme bacteria being killed off temporarily worsen the underlying symptoms.
  6. Blood tests have confirmed a Lyme diagnosis.

More on testing in the future articles. 

Information about Validation for This Questionnaire

The original version of the Lyme/MSIDS Questionnaire was developed by Dr Joseph Burrascano years prior, after he took histories from his chronic Lyme patients.

I then took the questionnaire and divided into 4 parts, asking questions about the frequency and severity of each symptom, while also capturing essential information on whether patients lived in Lyme endemic areas, had been bit by ticks, had EM rashes, asking whether their pain was migratory (a hallmark symptom of chronic Lyme disease), as well as reviewing the number of healthy mental and physical days they had in the past month.

The validation study for the Horowitz MSIDS Questionnaire (HMQ), proving that it is quite accurate, can be found below. It was done in 2017, and validated among 1,600 individuals in three medical practices, who were both healthy and sick, i.e., suffering from chronic Lyme disease.

Empirical Validation of the Horowitz Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome Questionnaire for Suspected Lyme Disease. Maryalice Citera*, Ph.D., Phyllis R. Freeman2, Ph.D., Richard I. Horowitz2, M.D., International Journal of General Medicine 2017:10 249–273

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28919803

https://www.dovepress.com/empirical-validation-of-the-horowitz-multiple-systemic-infectious-dise-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJGM

The results of a detailed statistical validation study by 2 Ph.D. psychologists at the State University of New Paltz showed that the Horowitz MSIDS Questionnaire (HMQ) showed convergent and divergent construct validity, as well as predictive validity. What does this mean? We can accurately classify the Lyme Status of an individual using the HMQ with an 87% accuracy. Compare that to standard two-tiered testing (STTT) using an ELISA and Western blot, which has an accuracy of about a coin flip i.e., 50%.

Download now

The questionnaire can be accessed and downloaded from my website here.

Then fill it out and give it to your healthcare provider if you scored over 25 on the questionnaire and suffer from a chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, neuropsychiatric illness. In the next few articles, I discuss the testing that is available to confirm a clinical diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease/PTLDS.

This is part one of a two-part series originally published on Substack by Dr. Richard Horowitz. 

Dr. Richard Horowitz has treated 13,000 Lyme and tick-borne disease patients over the last 40 years and is the best-selling author of  How Can I Get Better? and Why Can’t I Get Better? You can subscribe to read more of his work on Substack or join his Lyme-based newsletter for regular insights, tips, and advice.

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Lyme, research

Lyme Disease Triggers GBS

https://danielcameronmd.com/lyme-disease-guillian-barre-syndrome/

Lyme disease triggers Guillian-Barre Syndrome

lyme-disease-guillain-barre

In a letter to the editor entitled “Lyme Disease as an Extremely Rare Cause of Guillain‑Barré Syndrome in India,” Sudheer Varma Y and colleagues describe the case of a 50‑year‑old woman who suddenly developed difficulty swallowing, slurred speech, and weakness and numbness in both upper and lower limbs.

By 

Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune disorder in which your immune system mistakenly attacks the peripheral nerves surrounding the brain and spinal cord. GBS symptoms typically include weakness and/or tingling sensations in the legs, which can spread to the arms and upper body.

This patient also reported having three episodes of loose stools, two episodes of vomiting, and one episode of fever with chills and rigors.

A neurological exam found bulbar palsy of the ninth and tenth cranial nerves, reduced tone in all four limbs, absent deep tendon reflexes in the lower limbs, and absent bilateral plantar reflexes.

“Nerve conduction study suggested a demyelinating sensory‑motor polyneuropathy affecting both the upper and lower limbs, leading to a diagnosis of Guillain‑Barré syndrome (GBS),” the authors state.

The patient then developed lower motor neuron type of bilateral facial nerve palsy, which prompted testing for Lyme disease. Test results were positive and the woman was diagnosed with Guillain‑Barré Syndrome secondary to Lyme disease.

The patient was treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), gabapentin, and a 14‑day course of IV ceftriaxone.

Related Articles:

Lyme neuroborreliosis mimics Guillain-Barre Syndrome

Tick bite leads to Guillain-Barre Syndrome

Conversion disorder, Guillain-Barre Syndrome or neurologic Lyme disease?

References:
  1. Varma YS, Kumar V, Agarwal K, Biswas R, Adil M. Lyme Disease as an Extremely Rare Cause of Guillain-Barré Syndrome in India. Neurol India 2024;72:1102.

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Ticks, vaccines

Medical Detective: An Overview of Lyme Disease Signs and Symptoms

https://www.lymedisease.org/overview-lyme-signs-symptoms/

MEDICAL DETECTIVE: An overview of Lyme disease signs and symptoms

This article was originally posted on Dr. Richard Horowitz’s Medical Detective Substack. You can find more helpful content by subscribing to it here.

Now that you know that Lyme disease presents a regular risk for you and your family due to its worldwide spread, rapidly increasing tick populations due to a warming climate (ticks reproduce faster at higher temperatures), and lack of accurate testing, what are the most common Lyme symptoms, aside from the telltale rash, that you should be looking for to suspect an infection?

Signs and Symptoms of Lyme Disease

There are six major signs and symptoms that allow the Medical Detective to suspect an infection with Borrelia burgdorferi, the agent of Lyme disease:

(1) It is a multisystemic illness. Although it is possible to just have one joint that hurts and may be swollen as your primary symptom, this is not the usual manifestation that I have seen among the 13,000 chronically ill individuals I have diagnosed and treated. A broad range of body systems is usually affected, including the heart, musculoskeletal system, along with neurological, psychological, hormonal, and even immunological consequences, including immune deficiency.

So if you have a multisystemic illness, with many of the symptoms listed below, and your doctor has sent you to specialist after specialist looking for answers, that is a telltale sign Lyme disease may be present.

(2) Symptoms of Lyme disease tend to come and go with good and bad days. In many other chronic illnesses, symptoms tend to be daily without huge variations in intensity or frequency.

(3) The hallmark symptom of Lyme disease is migratory pain. Migratory joint pain, migratory muscle pain and/or migratory nerve pain (neuropathy, which is usually experienced as a burning, tingling, numbness or stabbing sensation) lets the Medical Detective know that a diagnosis of Lyme is likely. (There are only seven diseases that cause migratory pain.)

(4) Symptoms of Lyme disease usually get better or worse with antibiotics. This would not be the case with a chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal, cardiac, neuropsychiatric illness due to a pure viral infection (which can be the case in CFS/ME, FM, and/or long Covid). Symptoms that can get better (lowering the load of the bacteria) or worse (known as a Herxheimer reaction, which is an inflammatory reaction due to killing off of the bacteria) include the following:

*Muscle and joint pain (which can be migratory in nature)

*Severe fatigue

*Tingling and/or numbness/and/or burning and/or stabbing sensations (neuropathy, which can be migratory in nature)

*A stiff neck

*Headaches

*Light and sound sensitivity

*Dizziness

*Memory and concentration problems

*Mood disorders such as depression and/or anxiety

*Difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep

*Fever and/or chills

*Gastrointestinal issues

*Chest pain with palpitations

*Shortness of breath…and more.

*(I’ll have more details about symptoms in my next article.)

(5) Women usually have a worsening of Lyme disease symptoms around their menstrual cycle: before, during or right afterwards. This is because when estrogen levels drop, the bacteria can become more active.

(6) Finally, there are clues on blood tests that you have been exposed to Lyme disease and associated tick-borne infections, but it is important to know that standard two-tiered testing (STTT), using an ELISA followed by a Western blot–one of the primary ways doctors try to diagnose Lyme disease–is highly insensitive, with the accuracy of about a coin flip.

Insensitive testing

For early Lyme disease, doctors may use a version of the STTT, called “Modified two-tiered testing (MTTT),” where two enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) are used instead of the traditional Immunoblot. (Although in one Canadian study it was 25% better at diagnosing some early cases, it is still an imperfect test, and other studies have found the MTTT to be more or less equivalent to the STTT.)

Which means that, ultimately, Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis. An EM rash, the classic rash of Lyme disease, is proof of exposure and does not require a positive blood test. But if you did not see the rash, you need to know that negative testing with a STTT and/or a MTTT does not rule out exposure.

Clues that you have been exposed are Borrelia specific bands in your blood, such as the 23 kDa (Outer surface protein C, i.e., Osp C), 31 kDa (Osp A), 34 kDa (Osp B), 39 kDa and the 83/93 kDa bands. The exception is the 31 kDa band on a Western blot may cross react with viral proteins or reflect an autoimmune process. The 31 kDa band on an Immunoblot, a test that uses recombinant DNA, is however specific, which is why we prefer using Immunoblots as our first line test.

Standard treatment for Lyme disease

Because testing and treatment can be so complicated, there’s much more info to come….

For now, know that if caught early, the standard treatment for Lyme by some infectious disease doctors is a 14-day course of antibiotics, usually doxycycline or amoxicillin. For an EM rash, some doctors will prescribe antibiotics for up to 30 days.

However, if you have multiple EM rashes, or an EM rash with peripheral nervous system (PNS) involvement (tingling, numbness, burning, and/or stabbing sensations of the arms and legs) and/or central nervous system (CNS) involvement with nerve palsy like Bell’s palsy (where your facial muscles don’t work properly) with associated neuropathy, cognitive difficulties with memory/concentration problems, light or sound sensitivity, dizziness, sleep disorders, new or exacerbated psychological symptoms–short courses of antibiotics will not clear the infection, and you will go on to the chronic form of the disease.

When symptoms persist–Stephen’s story 

If symptoms persist, brace yourself! You could find yourself at the mercy of the bacteria that will make your life a misery. Like Stephen.

When Stephen came to see me in March 2020, he told me he’d had to drop out of his first semester at college because he couldn’t function anymore. He’d been suffering for 10 years—no, that is not a typo!–from a strange disease that had brought his life to a halt, going from one doctor to another trying to find a cure.

When I asked him to describe his symptoms, he took a deep breath. The list was long. “Well, I’m tired all the time, no matter what I do,” he told me. “My joints and muscles always ache. I get these sharp stabbing pain in my hands or legs or chest. Sometimes it’s a burning pain.” He shook his head, confused. After all these years, he still couldn’t understand why this was happening. It didn’t make sense.

Working on a theory, I asked if he experienced shortness of breath or night sweats. He did. But then, carefully avoiding my eyes, he confessed to the worst symptom of all. “Sometimes —not always—I see or hear things that aren’t really there.”

My heart went out to him. This bright young man with such a promising future had suddenly developed auditory and visual hallucinations when he was 18 for no apparent reason. A psychiatrist decided he was schizophrenic, and prescribed an antipsychotic that came with serious side effects. Once Stephen had this diagnosis, no doctor had ever listened to him the same way again. Until now.

An important piece of the puzzle

“Have you ever been around cats?” I asked him.

“Not lately,” he said. Then he remembered that, growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he’d had a cat. Inevitably, she had scratched and bitten him more times than he could remember.

“How about tick bites?”

“Sure,” he said. “But that was years ago…”

As I questioned him, the pieces of the medical puzzle started to fall into place. I’d seen the same series of infectious and environmental assaults in patients with this illness for decades. I thought it might also stem from the same infections.

When I asked Stephen to stand up for the physical exam, he felt dizzy. I checked his pulse. It had jumped more than 30 beat per minute and stayed high for several more minutes.

That was a clear sign of POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), a dysregulation in areas of the nervous system that controls our blood pressure and pulse rate. I see this problem regularly in my chronic Lyme disease patients, those suffering from long Covid, as well as those with problems due to environmental toxins like mold.

When he lifted his shirt so I could listen to his lungs, Stephen muttered, apologetically, “Oh, I have a rash…” That was an understatement. Spreading across his entire middle and upper back was a distinctive purple rash that looked like horizontal stretch marks.

I smiled. “I need to confirm it with blood tests, but I think I know what’s causing your symptoms.”

Stephen was stunned. “What is it?”

“A parasite,” I told him. “It’s called Babesia. It’s a protozoan, like malaria, that can cause sweats, chills, shortness of breath. And I also strongly suspect you have contracted a bacterial infection called Bartonella, often transmitted through cat bites and scratches.”

When we got his laboratory results back, they confirmed my suspicions. “Bartonella could’ve caused all of your neuropsychiatric symptoms—and the rash!” I told him.

Other factors

That said, a condition as extreme as Stephen’s is not just about parasites and little-known bacterial infections. There were a lot of contributing factors. He’d been exposed to environmental toxins like mold, along with vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and this had exacerbated and compounded his symptoms, preventing his immune system from clearing away any lingering infections and making it difficult for him to detoxify and improve.

With so many things going on, it was clear that Stephen didn’t just have Lyme disease. He had Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome (MSIDS). He had multiple overlapping sources of inflammation with downstream effects making him ill.

When I started Stephen’s treatment, using dapsone combination therapy for chronic Lyme disease and Bartonella, he soon felt like a completely different person. For the first time in over a decade, his pain was gone. His joint and muscles didn’t ache. The stabbing, burning nerve pains had disappeared. No more night sweats (we will devote an entire article to Babesia in the future). No fatigue.

Even the hallucinations were almost gone. After struggling to regain his health for so long that he had nearly given up hope, Stephen was almost completely back to normal — in months — after finally getting the right treatment.

And you can get the right treatment too.

More to come

In upcoming articles, I’m going to talk much, much more about MSIDS, and the 16-point treatment plan that I used my Medical Detective skills to develop. It’s a treatment plan that works for not only chronic Lyme disease, but many other chronic illnesses which share overlapping biological processes with the three I’s: multiple infections, inflammation, and immune dysfunction.

Coming up next, I’m going to share the Lyme questionnaire, taken from my book. How Can I Get Better? and published in the International Journal of General Medicine. We validated this questionnaire in 1,600 individuals, both healthy and sick, with help from researchers at the State University of New Paltz. I know it’s going to help if you worry at all that you or someone you know might have Lyme disease. Then, in future articles, we are going to dive into the broad range of testing available to help diagnose early and late disease.

This article was originally published on Substack by Dr. Richard Horowitz. 

Dr. Richard Horowitz has treated 13,000 Lyme and tick-borne disease patients over the last 40 years and is the best-selling author of  How Can I Get Better? and Why Can’t I Get Better? You can subscribe to read more of his work on Substack or join his Lyme-based newsletter for regular insights, tips, and advice.

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Category:

Babesia, Bartonella, Lyme, Pain Management, Testing, Treatment

Lyme Q&A Series With Dr. Marty Ross

Sign Up for the November Lyme Q&A Series Through LymeUNITED

We’ve Moved. Conversations with Marty Ross MD is located inside the LymeUNITED membership support community. LymeUNITED is now FREE. But you will need to join LymeUNITED and then RSVP to participate in the Wednesday webinar. 

  • Step 1. Join LymeUNITED for Free
  • Step 2. Click “Dr. Ross Q&A Webinar” in the left column navigation menu
  • Step 3. Click on the title of the event you want to attend to RSVP and to learn all about Conversations with Marty Ross MD using the live Zoom Room through LymeUNITED.

Join LymeUNITED Now.

Watch Webinar Recordings

You have two options to watch Conversations with Marty Ross, MD Recordings.

  1. With Recording Headings and Time Stamp. In LymeUNITED you can watch the recording which includes time stamps and headings to find what you are looking for more easily. Once you are in LymeUNITED go to the “Zoom Event Recordings” located in the left hand navigation menu. Watch on LymeUNITED.

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  2. No Headings or Time Stamps. Watch on YouTube. This version does not require you sign up for a Free LymeUNITED membership. But, it does not include time stamps or section headings. Watch on YouTube.
Get Help and Support

If you have questions, there are three ways that we can help you.

  1. Join LymeUNITED: A Community Powering Health for FREE. This is our online support community hosted by Marty Ross, MD with an active group of supporting members. You don’t have to do it alone.
  2. Participate in our free weekly Lyme Q&A webinar called Conversations with Marty Ross MD.
  3. Read, or watch our helpful articles in the online Lyme Guide at Treat Lyme by Marty Ross MD.

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Category:

Activism, Lyme

Why Chronic Lyme Patients Don’t Get Better

http://

Why Chronic Lyme Patients Don’t Get Better

Dr. Richard Horowitz

10/30/24

In this Made for Health episode, Dr. Richard Horowitz, a leading expert in Lyme disease, joins us to discuss the complexities of Lyme and its connection to chronic health issues. With over 35 years of experience treating Lyme patients, Dr. Horowitz sheds light on his innovative 16-point model, which uncovers overlapping factors that contribute to chronic illnesses. He also shares insights on recent advances in treatment, including Dapsone Combination Therapy, and explores the rising challenges posed by co-infections, mold toxicity, and the impact of long COVID on patient health.

Dr. Richard Horowitz is a board-certified internist and the medical director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center, an integrative medical center which combines both classical and complementary approaches in the treatment of Lyme disease and other tick-borne disorders. He has treated over 13,000 Lyme and tick-borne disease patients in the last 35 years, with patients coming from all over the US, Canada, and Europe to his clinic. He is former Assistant Director of Medicine of Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and is one of the founding members and past president elect of ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. He is also past president of the ILADEF, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the education of health care professionals on tick-borne diseases. Dr Horowitz has trained hundreds of healthcare providers in diagnosing and caring for patients with treatment-resistant tick-borne disorders and was previously awarded the Humanitarian of the Year award by the Turn the Corner Foundation as well as awards from Project Lyme for his treatment of Lyme Disease. He has dedicated his life to helping those stricken with this devastating illness.

Validated Lyme Questionnaire: https://mailchi.mp/8e5ccb1a9297/lyme-…

Informational PDF on Validated Lyme Disease Questionnaire: https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.co…

Website: https://cangetbetter.com/

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Treatment