Lyme Disease Doctors
Dr. Allen Steele is credited with discovering Lyme disease in 1975. So named for the location that had several children and twelve adults who shared symptoms and appeared to have juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Anecdotally, several test subjects stated that they had noticed a strange rash that spread rather quickly before developing the other symptoms.
A visiting European professor mentioned to Dr. Steele that the rash was similar to a rash caused by tick bites in Europe so he began testing for the various tick borne diseases along with the one hundred plus arthropod born viruses. All test results came back negative for both disease vectors.
European Lyme disease doctors had treated the tick bite rash (erythema migrans) with Penicillin based antibiotics and had great success. This suggested that the disease was bacteria based and not viral in nature. Most successful treatment regimens were made with IV antibiotic regimens of four weeks in length.
In most cases, the symptoms were gone at the end of the treatment course. Patients with chronic Lyme disease or those diagnosed a long time after initial exposure had relatively poor results with the short IV antibiotic treatment.
There are a group of Lyme disease doctors who support a longer term antibiotic treatment due to the ability of the Borrelia bacteria to lie dormant and not show symptoms for awhile.
Doctor Steele and his associates have come out against this type of treatment and have stated that Lyme disease is the most misdiagnosed and under diagnosed disease that doctors were using to treat hypochondriacs, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.
The dissident doctors formed the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society to treat those sufferers that Doctor Steele says do not exist.
The biggest problem with Lyme disease is that symptoms may not show up for months or years after the initial tick bite. Make sure that if you are bitten by a tick to capture the tick in a bottle for identification and possible treatment immediately if called for.
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