Bowman's Thoughts and Things

Host Gator Web Hosting

2012-01-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Thinking about putting up a new website about Lyme disease. Here is the place to get started. These folks are great and real reasonable.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T16:53:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

I want to wish all of my fellow Lyme disease sufferers, a very happy and safe New Year!. May 2012 be a year where we find solutions for much of the misery of having Lyme disease. Stay in touch, as I am testing some new nutraceuticals that have been showing some amazing results in the realm of weight loss and pain relief. I have just started their use and I will report what my personal experience is with them on a few weeks. 2012 is an election year and I know all of you are concerned about the direction of our country. Please make yourselves aware of all of the issues that will be discussed in this political season. Be a voter that is knowledgeable! This country is in terrible need of new leaders who are not afraid to put God back in America. The three branches of our government need to hear us loud and clear this election. We are tired of the childish in-fighting and quarreling. We are tired of being lied to. The current leadership in both the House and the Senate need to go. The oval office needs a god-fearing man or woman who is not afraid to speak the truth and not afraid to make the really tough decisions that so desperately need made. The health care system does not need "Obamacare"! Before you vote this year, look deep inside your heart. All of us can be "the Salt of the Earth" that the scriptures talk about. Decide in 2012, that you will stand up and be counted on the side of saving our Constitution.

Always be well,
God Bless!

Rich Bowman

A Cure to Late for many

2011-12-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

http://youtu.be/6-2shnzhBaE

Lyme Disease Natural Remedy Report

2011-11-22T19:54:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone, I found a product you might be interested in.

“Any test recommendations or health information provided from Bowman's Thoughts and things, written or verbal, are for educational purposed only and it not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease or condition”Click Here!
Be well,

Richard

2011-11-10T20:04:00.001-07:00

2011-11-10T19:51:00.001-07:00

Nature's Dirty Needle

2011-10-18T12:02:00.002-06:00

Hi Everyone,

This is a great article I ran across from our friends at Lymedisease.org.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland.
This is a great artricle!

Be well,
Richard

TOUCHED BY LYME: (book review) Nature's Dirty Needle

05 October, 2011

Font size:

A Lyme-literate nurse practitioner writes about chronic Lyme disease.

The image of heroin addicts sharing dirty needles is a strong one. Most people understand it’s a bad idea, an easy way to spread diseases like HIV and hepatitis.

The image of ticks as “nature’s dirty needle” is also dramatic. Ticks stick their mouth parts into mice, birds, squirrels, deer and untold other wild animals, picking up viruses, worms, protozoa and oh yes, bacterial infections like Lyme disease. By the time the tick sticks its dirty needle into you, you risk contracting a variety of different pathogens, some of them not even named yet.

In her book, “Nature’s Dirty Needle,” Lyme-literate nurse practitioner Mara Williams explores the topic of chronic Lyme disease as the end result of this toxic soup transmitted by tick saliva. The Lyme spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, is only part of the mix.

The complexity of chronic Lyme, with its myriad coinfections, is one reason it can be so confounding to diagnose and treat this disease. And why it’s essential for Lyme patients to find a knowledgeable practitioner. Williams describes symptoms, treatment and some of the politics surrounding Lyme and coinfections.

She interweaves personal anecdotes from individuals with Lyme, spelling out how difficult it was for them to get properly diagnosed, as well as the ups and downs of their experiences with treatment.

Ultimately, she sums up a bleak picture: “In the current health care system, there is no place for the millions who are ill with CLD (chronic Lyme disease) to get help when they are in need of more intensive support and care. No hospital exists that recognizes and treats these infections….Every person that I have spoken with who is ill with CLD has mentioned their frustration that there is nowhere for them to get help when they are relapsing or herxing.”

At the end of the book, Williams lays out her ideas for a healing center called Inanna House, which she would like to build in Sonoma County, CA. It would be geared to the needs of chronic Lyme patients, a place to receive supportive therapies and start IV treatments in a safe environment. It would offer both in-patient and out-patient care, as well as workshops and classes. It would incorporate a range of healing modalities, both western and alternative.

I don’t know how far along her plans are, or what it would take to open and run such a facility. But as I read the last chapter, where she describes her vision for Inanna House, I could imagine Lyme patients everywhere giving the idea a standing ovation.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org's VP for Education and Outreach. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.

Phone Detective-

2011-10-16T18:38:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone,

This is a great resource tool in finding anyone's cell phone number or an unlisted number.There are many reasons why you might want to conduct a reverse phone search:

Find out the source of a harassing ("prank") caller
Research a number that appeared on your phone bill
Locate an old friend from high school or college
Research "missed calls" on your caller ID that you don't recognize
Verify an address
And more

Why don't you give this a try?

Be well,
Richard

http://b328eblj5igagzberiy6vne23y.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=PEOPLE

Ticks Aren't the Only Parasites

2011-10-11T05:27:00.001-06:00

Hello, everyone,

I ran across this letter the other day and I thought I would copy it to the blog. I can't help but feel the exact same way this author feels about the physicians of the CDC who continue to show their ignorance about Lyme Disease. This was first published in Forbes magazine. It was written to Forbes as a letter to the editor by a pychiatrist named Virginia T. Sherr. I thank her for saying what needed to be said. I hope you all will agree.
I found this on a great website:
http://thehumansideoflyme.net/

Be well,

Richard

Dear Editor,
Neuro-Lyme, (persistent, chronic, active Lyme disease) is a burgeoning epidemic. My psychiatric practice has been filled with the unfortunate but previously misdiagnosed victims of tick-borne diseases for at least the last 10 years.
There are literally hundreds of high quality, peer-reviewed, easily obtained, scientific articles credibly attesting to the devastating persistence of this living spirochete-caused neurologic disease and its crippling effects on whole populations. However, instead of pursuing such research and presenting a balanced picture of the science, your reporter has cited only the Infectious Diseases Society of America, whose framing of the disease represents the most radically restrictive of all viewpoints in what is one of the more hotly-contested controversies in all of medicine.
For decades, physicians holding to IDSA's view of Lyme disease have turned away desperately ill patients by telling them they must be mentally unbalanced to imagine that they or their children are physically ill. These patients show up at my psychiatric practice crippled and in great pain, barely able to function. Only after receiving appropriate long-term antibiotic and immunity-enhancing treatments, usually far exceeding the IDSA guidelines, are their lives restored.
Alleged, inappropriate financial gain associated with some Lyme-treating physicians was alluded to in your reporter's poorly researched piece. IDSA authors, on the other hand, have documentable financial conflicts of interest that were never mentioned in your article. These include patents for a vaccine still under development in Europe and the US, financial interests in Lyme disease products such as test kits, and, most importantly, employment by the insurance companies that stand to lose money if the epidemic is acknowledged and paid for. The vested conflicts of interest of these authors are seldom revealed when they publish in their authoritative journals.
While these few exploitative yet influential academicians violate everything Hippocrates ever stood for, rank and file physicians stand by confused. In their impotency, they unknowingly are allowing this epidemic of tick-borne infections to grow exponentially.

Virginia T. Sherr, MD, DLFAPA

Brooke Landau- A Battle with Lyme

2011-10-09T00:35:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone,

Please take the time to watch this video. There are a few mistakes in the recording, but it doesn't compromise the message. I found this vide on you tube and it exemplifies the struggle of those of us with Chronic Lyme. Please note the mention of intravenous antibiotics and the use of a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber. I would love to here from anyone who has had success with the Hyperbaric oxygen. have been contemplating using this therapy, if I can figure out where I can get it.

http://youtu.be/iaAjCRBcKJs

Researchers Say Local Antibiotic Therapy Stops Lyme Disease

2011-10-09T00:06:00.000-06:00

Hi all,

This a great article from our friends at Infectioncontrolltoday.com. This is the kind of research that is needed for us as Lyme sufferers. I am again on long term intravenous antibiotic therapy. My insurance company is trying to deny the payment of this treatment. I am appealing their decission, of course. Meanwhile, many of you know how effective intravenous antibiotic treatment can be for more than 30 days. If any of you have any experience with this treatment, I hope you would comment and let me know how you are doing. Your experience might be extremely helpful for those of us who are being treated or contemplating this kind of treatment. I started with two grams of Rocephin once a day, for 30 days. Now, I am doing one gram once a day and this has been going on for two months now. I have certainly been "herxing" and I have had some tough days,feeling really bad. However, I am feeling stronger in many ways and I feel as if I am getting a little better every day. I am being helped by my neurologist, who has had some experience with Lyme disease. I can't tell you great he has been to me. He is seriously trying to make me feel better. I have been plagued with this disease since 2001 and I have undergone many types of treatment. The only times I have really felt better is when I have intravenous antibiotic therapy. I have had a Groshong catheter inserted in my chest. It has never been a problem maintaining the catheter and keeping the area around the insertion clean. Previously, when Dr. Martz was in practice here in Colorado, he started me on the first treatment of the intravenous antibiotic protocol. I was really sick and in bed then. The therapy went on for about eight months and it got me out of bed and functioning as a human being again. I had the catheter removed and felt better for a year or so. However, that has been about six years ago and I have been struggling with flareups of the disease again. Many of you,probably, have had similar experiences, and all of us would love hearing about them. I am listening to the news right now and Colorado Springs has already received their first snow storm. It looks like winter time is on its way and we are going to skip fall. I hope not!!! I hate the cold since i have had this disease. It just makes everything hurt worse.

Be well,

Richard

Lyme disease is a dangerous disease which is transmitted by ticks. Blood-sucking ticks ingest the agents that cause the disease – bacteria of the species Borrelia burgdorferi and its relatives – during a blood meal, and subsequently transmit them to the next victim they feast on, often a person. It is estimated that, in Western Europe, up to half of all ticks carry the bacteria. Although the early symptoms of the illness are quite mild, if left untreated, it can result in serious damage to the skin, the joints, the heart and the nervous system, and effective therapy becomes very difficult.
A team of researchers led by the veterinary bacteriologist professor Reinhard Straubinger at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) München has now shown, in an animal model, that application of a gel containing the antibiotic azithromycin to the site of the bite rapidly terminates the infection. The efficacy of this local antibiotic therapy for the treatment of borreliosis in humans is now being tested in a Phase III clinical trial. In the meantime, though, patients must still undergo antibiotic treatment for several weeks and, in many cases, the drug must be administered intravenously – which is distressing not only for children. Furthermore, treatment measures are often initiated on suspicion, because the bacteria are not detectable in the blood soon after one has been bitten by an infected tick.
"Our approach simply involves applying a transparent, self-adhesive plaster to the site of the wound," says Straubinger. "Because the plaster contains very little antibiotic, the effects are localized and side-effects are negligible."
Reference: Knauer J, et al. Evaluation of the preventive capacities of a topically applied azithromycin formulation against Lyme borreliosis in a murine model. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy online, Sept. 15, 2011.

How About some Diversion?

2011-10-08T23:44:00.003-06:00

Hi My Friends,

I thought I would be a little different and offer a diversion to those of you who like games. Sometimes it is just better to take our mind off of our problems and get some diversion. If you enjoy airplanes and flying, well I have a fun game for you. The name of this game is Proflight Simulator and it is a lot of fun. It is a blast!! So if the Lyme b"blahs" have you down, I suggest you give this a try. I have to see a couple of doctors next week for some Lyme related problems and I have been dreading it. I needed to find something to do for some enjoyment. I hope it may work for you as well.

Be well and enjoy,
Richard

http://4e65bil9alkcdrnm5cg7ocleao.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=PROFLIGHT

Lyme Disease Inspires Woman to Help

2011-09-14T18:45:00.003-06:00

Richard Gwin

Tammy Farmer sits with her son Logan, 10, as he plays with his pet guinea pig Stewart. Farmer unknowingly was a carrier of Lyme disease when she gave birth to Logan. Farmer and Logan were diagnosed three years ago.

Micki Chestnut

September 11, 2011

When Tammy Farmer gave birth to her son, Logan, her life changed dramatically, but not in the usual way.
Without knowing it, Farmer was a carrier of Lyme disease, and it wasn’t until she went through the physical stress of childbirth that she began to experience symptoms like excruciating pain and cognitive impairment. Because the tick-borne bacterium that cause Lyme disease can pass through the placenta, Logan was infected before he was born.
As Farmer left the hospital with her newborn, she began the battle of her life, not only fighting for her and her son’s health, but also for other victims of Lyme disease by volunteering for Kansas Lyme Fighters Inc.
Lyme disease can cause a wide array of health challenges that range from gastrointestinal to neurological to musculoskeletal, making it easy to misdiagnose. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the 328,128 cases of Lyme disease that were confirmed between 1990 and 2008 represent only 10 percent of the actual cases of Lyme disease, according to the Lyme Disease Association. In fact, Farmer was misdiagnosed for seven years with baffled doctors telling her she had everything from multiple sclerosis to lupus.
At times, she was so devastated by the illness that she couldn’t function. “At my lowest moments, I was in bed, incapacitated, because it hurt so badly. It hurt just to have someone walking on the carpet outside my bedroom,” Farmer said.
Farmer and Logan were finally diagnosed three years ago and started aggressive antibiotic treatment. While she still has bad days, she’s beginning to recover. And she’s using her newfound health to help others who suffer from tick-borne illnesses through a nonprofit group she helped to found, Kansas Lyme Fighters. Her volunteer work has been so transformative in the lives of people who battle Lyme disease that the organization nominated Farmer for the United Way Roger Hill Volunteer Center’s 2010 Wallace Galluzzi Outstanding Volunteer award.
In addition to helping raise awareness of tick-borne illnesses, Farmer runs support groups and works as an advocate. But mostly, she comes alongside those who are sick and offers them support and encouragement.
“Tammy’s strength is building community,” said Peggy Blumhagen, president of Kansas Lyme Fighters. “She has opened her home to multiple people who were suffering and created an environment of acceptance, comfort and love. Tammy rarely shares how she feels except when it helps to encourage people who are about to give up on their life. When they realize how much she is suffering also, they gain courage and strength to keep trying to get well.”
Farmer shrugs off the praise. “After something so devastating has affected my family’s life, I couldn’t help but help others,” she says. “I was sick for years before it was figured out, and that’s not uncommon at all. It happens to people all the time, and their lives are as devastated as mine was. Or worse. I had family to support me, but I know a lot of people who don’t.
“When you go through something like this, you narrow down what is important in your life. People are important, and that’s what makes life go around. Making them feel better, even for just a moment.”
For information or to volunteer for Kansas Lyme Fighters, see kansaslymefighters.org.

Originally published at: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2011/sep/11/firsthand-family-experience-lyme-disease-inspires-/

New Blood Test Available- Great News

2011-09-13T01:25:00.000-06:00

Physicians:

Patients:


		View more FPInterviews information New Borrelia Culture Test - Faster & More Accurate September 5, 2011 Joe Burrascano, Jr., MD has announced a new lab test available for Lyme doctors to use in determining if Lyme is present. There is no need to wait for antibodies to form since this is a culture-based test. This should provide much faster and more accurate detection, and allow Lyme patients to receive treatment as soon as possible. Please read below for Dr. Burrascano's description of the new test: In my work as a consultant, I have been working with a private lab located near Philadelphia, Advanced Laboratories, Inc. They wanted to develop a unique and high value test, and, with my interest in Lyme, I naturally encouraged them to work on a better Lyme Disease test. As a result of some very intensive work on the part of a group of some very brilliant scientists, they have succeeded in developing a reliable and rapid blood culture for Borrelia! See the attached press release. They actually have rolled out two separate panels- a basic one and an advanced one. In the basic panel, the blood sample is cultured and the positives are identified by histology and growth characteristics, and confirmed by fluorescent immunostaining. Positive reports will include a picture of the Bb growing in that very culture. The advanced panel will do this, but will also do PCR using well characterized and published DNA primer sets, and then all positive PCRs will be confirmed by DNA sequencing. Remarkably, turn-around time can be as brief as ten days for the basic test, and seven to ten more days for the advanced panel. This test is being rolled out gradually, with no big public announcements yet. That is why I am e-mailing you, so you can be among the first to be able to order this testing, before the lab gets swamped. Apparently you have to contact the lab to have test kits sent to you. The blood must be sent out the same day it is collected, and the lab provides a prepaid return FedEx mailer. As the lab is not yet accepting specimens over weekends, please do not collect blood on Fridays. The bad news- New York being New York, this culture will not be available to NY State practitioners for several months. The States of California and Florida may have a delayed availability- I am not sure, so please contact the lab to get this info. However, all other states are OK. I have no idea on pricing or on insurance issues- again, you will have to contact them for this info. The lab plans to have a booth at the conferences at LDA and at ILADS, so hopefully their presence will allow all to field questions. The next step in their research is also equally exciting and ground breaking, but I am not at liberty to say yet what is being planned. I will be travelling over the rest of this week, so I am afraid that I may not be able to answer any calls or e-mails until I get back, so if I do not respond to any contact efforts, please be patient. As many of you recall, I learned the basics of true, clinical Lyme over 25 years ago thanks to Bb culturing that was available to me by Dr. Alan MacDonald. The new methods being used by this Pennsylvania lab go far beyond what MacDonald was able to do, so I am very excited to not only share this news with you, but I also cannot wait to see how it will change how we practice. I also predict that Bb will be found in a lot of people, from mildly to severely ill, and that will redefine the role of the immunologist in Lyme to find out why some people recover and why others do not. Strain info as provided by the DNA sequencing data will be equally fascinating to follow. So, enjoy the good news, and PLEASE, if you are going to begin culturing your patients, keep good records of your results. Data collection and tabulation has never been as important as it is now, with a quantum advance in testing technology. Best wishes, from Dr. B................................! To read the press release with contact information, Click here

Customer Service Telephone: 800 755 3402 (International: 001 805 693 1802)
Fax: 805 693 1806 (International: 001 805 693 1806)
©2011 Researched Nutritionals® LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Fix Your PC Online

2011-09-03T20:49:00.000-06:00

'https://secure.plumchoice.com/CreateCustomerAff.aspx?AffCode=39AEB5B0'>Click for Remote PC Repair! It's fast, easy & secure! Registration is FREE!

Antibodies linked to long-term Lyme symptoms

2011-08-07T18:14:00.002-06:00

Thanks to Nature News and the author for this great article! This is great news for many of us suffering from Chronic Lyme Disease.

Be Well,

Richard

Amy Maxmen

Ticks spread the bacterium behind Lyme disease - but symptoms can persist even when the bug seems to have gone.Medical-on-Line/Alamy

Some patients with Lyme disease still show symptoms long after their treatment has finished. Now proteins have been discovered that set these people apart from those who are easily cured.

People who experience the symptoms of Lyme disease, which include fatigue, soreness and memory or concentration loss, after treatment for the disorder are sometimes diagnosed as having chronic Lyme disease or post-Lyme disease syndrome. But these diagnoses are difficult to make, because the individuals no longer seem to harbour the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. And the symptoms could instead be indicative of chronic fatigue syndrome or depression.

Now Armin Alaedini at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and his colleagues have found that patients diagnosed with post-Lyme disease syndrome have antibodies that suggest they carried the infection for an unusually long time. The finding, published in Clinical Immunology¹, might help the syndrome to be better understood, diagnosed and treated.

Alaedini's team looked at antibodies made in response to a protein called VlsE, which is found on the surface of Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-borne bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

The antibodies recognize a snippet of the protein called an epitope, and recruit the immune system to attack the bacterium. The researchers found that post-Lyme sufferers have a greater variety of antibodies to this epitope than patients whose infection cleared up quickly.

This finding suggests that patients with chronic symptoms have experienced a prolonged infection, caused by microbes that have evaded the immune system by varying the epitopes they carry. As a result of these variations, the body makes new antibodies targeting the modified protein. The longer the microbe manages to keep changing, the more diverse its host's antibodies become.

Some post-Lyme sufferers had varied antibodies against VlsE epitopes despite being diagnosed and treated early, says Alaedini. "That could mean they naturally have a different antibody response to the infection than most people; it could mean they weren't treated properly; or it's possible they were reinfected and the second infection was never treated," he says.

Inflammatory role

"This is the first study I've seen that shows some immunologic difference between someone who resolves their Lyme and someone who develops post-Lyme disease syndrome," says Linda Bockenstedt, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

The presence of varied antibodies hints that the chronic symptoms could be caused by an ongoing inflammatory response caused by antibodies mistakenly reacting to the body's own proteins, Bockenstedt suggests.

"The big question to me is whether this can lead to an autoimmune phenomenon," says Bockenstedt. "But if that were the case, I'd expect the disease to worsen without immune-modulating treatment, and it doesn't."

Alaedini suggests that higher levels of antibodies could increase the body's levels of cytokines, immune-system proteins that can trigger the symptoms experienced by patients with post-Lyme disease syndrome. "Various cytokine profiles have been associated with fatigue, anxiety and depression," he explains.

If these antibodies are unique to people with chronic Lyme disease, it could lead to a test and treatments for the disorder, Alaedini says. It could also guide treatment of the disease itself. "If patients with an acute infection develop antibodies to these epitopes, perhaps they require a more aggressive course of therapy," he adds.

But a predictive marker won't be useful without new therapies for the persistent symptoms, says Henry Feder Jr, a physician specializing in infectious diseases at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. If an immune response problem leads to the syndrome, antibiotics won't help. "I guarantee you that if you tell a patient they won't feel better after antibiotics, they won't," Feder says. "We need to know what's going on."

References
1. Chandra A. et al. Clin. Immunol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.clim.2011.06.005 (2011).

Lyme Disease in Illinois

2011-07-07T15:44:00.002-06:00

Hi friends,

Here is another fine article about the reach of Lyme disease in new habitats. This is the link if you prefer: http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0621lyme_J_Rydzewski_NohraMateus-Pinilla.html. Thanks be to Illinois University and Diana Yates for her fine artricle.

Be well,

Richard

6/21/2011 | Diana Yates, Life Sciences Editor | 217-333-5802; diya@illinois.edu

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — A new study offers a detailed look at the status of Lyme disease in Central Illinois and suggests that deer ticks and the Lyme disease bacteria they host are more adaptable to new habitats than previously appreciated.

A new study found a potential new reservoir of Lyme disease: the prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). | Photo by Michael Jeffords, Illinois Natural History Survey

Led by researchers at the University of Illinois, the study gives an up-close view of one region affected by the steady march of deer ticks across the upper Midwest. Their advance began in Wisconsin and Minnesota and is moving at a pace of up to two counties a year in Illinois and Indiana.

Today the deer tick is established in 26 Illinois counties, up from just eight in 1998, said Illinois Department of Public Health entomologist Linn Haramis. Reports of human Lyme disease cases in the state have more than tripled in the same period, he said.

“We’ve had several years in a row where we’ve had over 100 cases, up from about 30 per year more than 10 years ago,” Haramis said. “It’s not a huge increase, but it’s been steady and there’s an upward trend.”

Deer ticks are known to do best in forested areas, where they can readily move from small mammals (which provide their first meal) to moist leaf litter on the forest floor, and then to deer, on which they mate. Deer ticks do not pick up the Lyme infection from deer, said Jennifer Rydzewski, who completed her master’s degree with the study in the department of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois.

“The deer tick will feed on a variety of mammals, birds and even reptiles,” she said. “But Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, replicates really well within white-footed mice, so white-footed mice are the main reservoir that passes that bacterium on to the immature ticks that are feeding on it.”

White-footed mice also are forest dwellers. Prior to the new study, little was known about whether, or how, Lyme disease persists in other habitat types.

To determine if Lyme disease had gained a foothold in the patchwork of forests, farms and prairies of Central Illinois, researchers trapped small mammals in Allerton Park, a 1,500-acre (600-hectare) natural area in Piatt County. They focused on four habitat types: young forest, mature forest, a flood plain and a 30-acre (12-hectare) patch of prairie surrounded by woods and agricultural fields.

The researchers removed deer ticks from the mammals they trapped and tested the ticks for Lyme disease.

They found that the immature forest and the prairie hosted the highest percentage of deer-tick-infested mammals, the highest number of ticks per mammal trapped and the highest rates of ticks infected with Lyme disease of the four habitat types evaluated.

“The highest prevalence of B. burgdorferi infection was found (in deer tick larvae) from the prairie (27 percent) followed by the young forest (15 percent), the mature forest (6 percent) and the flood plain (6 percent),” the researchers wrote.

“Interestingly, all of the positive ticks from the prairie were from prairie voles, not the typical white-footed mouse,” Rydzewski said. There also were many more ticks per animal on the prairie voles than on the white-footed mice of the forest, she said.

This is the first study to report evidence that the prairie vole may potentially serve as a competent reservoir host for the Lyme disease bacterium, B. burgdorferi, said Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey who led the study with Rydzewski and natural resources and environmental sciences emeritus professor Richard Warner. (The Survey is a unit of the Prairie Research Institute at Illinois.)

“The fact that we found tick larvae feeding so prominently on prairie voles and those ticks were infected and hadn’t had a chance to feed on anything else is a very strong indicator that we are dealing with a different reservoir of Lyme disease that deserves more attention,” Mateus-Pinilla said.

The researchers hypothesize that when newly hatched ticks find themselves on the prairie, they latch on to the first small mammal that comes along, which in most cases is a prairie vole (white-footed mice prefer the forest). The abundance of prairie voles in the prairie is much lower than that of the white-footed mice in the forest, so more tick larvae and nymphs end up on the same few prairie voles. Since the number of ticks per animal is higher on the prairie, the likelihood of infection is higher there as well.

“The landscape of Illinois, especially the northern and central area, is very fragmented with agricultural and other development, so there aren’t really big continuous areas that are forested,” Rydzewski said. “And so maybe these ticks are finding new habitats to establish themselves in because of the lack of previous habitats.”

“What’s exciting about the new findings is that we are dealing with potentially new mechanisms of disease transmission that we just have not explored and perhaps we do not understand,” Mateus-Pinilla said. “We need to think outside of what we already know about Lyme disease transmission.”

The new study appears in the journal Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases.

Researchers from the U. of I. department of pathobiology and Michigan State University also contributed to this study.

Editor's note: To contact Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, call 217-333-6856; email nohram@illinois.edu. The paper, “Ixodes scapularis and Borrelia burgdorferi Among Diverse Habitats Within a Natural Area in East-Central Illinois,” in the journal Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, is available from the U. of I. News Bureau.

Subscribe to this RSS Feed | View the RSS Feed.

A Deadly New Reason to Avoid Deer Ticks - Healthy Living Center - Everyday Health

2011-07-07T15:32:00.000-06:00

Hi my friends,

It has been awhile since I have posted on my blog. I have been battling a flareup in my Lyme disease. I am back on Rocephin treatments again. This time I have a Groshong catheterin my chest and we are using a push syringe to deliver the medicine. I am hoping that a few months of this treatment will go along ways in making me feel better. Below is a great article about Babesiosis from our friends at Healthday news.

Be well,

Richard

HealthDay News

A Deadly New Reason to Avoid Deer Ticks

A little-known illness they're spreading can be fatal, especially to people with a weak immune system.

By Maureen Salamon, HealthDay News

WEDNESDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) — Move over, Lyme disease: Another tick-borne illness is on the rise in various parts of the country, and this one can kill.

Known as babesiosis, the disease is caused by a microscopic parasite that attacks blood cells, causing flu-like symptoms that can make it difficult to accurately diagnose. Like Lyme disease, which is caused by bacteria, babesia microti parasites are carried by deer ticks.

First documented in Massachusetts in 1969, the once-obscure babesiosis has surfaced as a significant public health threat in parts of the Northeast and Upper Midwest over the last several years. A recent study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, revealed that between 2001 and 2008 cases climbed from six to 119 in New York's Lower Hudson Valley -- a 20-fold regional increase.

And many cases may be escaping detection, experts say.

"I think it's underreported. One of the reasons we're seeing more about it is because people are becoming more aware," said Dr. Peter Krause, a babesiosis researcher and senior research scientist at the Yale University School of Public Health. "The theory is that it's spreading from east to west, as if you were dropping a pebble in a pond and it spread outward geographically."

About 1,000 cases are reported annually in affected locales, Krause said, but many people with babesiosis have no symptoms and never know they're harboring the parasite. For others, symptoms can include high fever, severe headache, fatigue, chills, and muscle aches and pains. It is treated with antimicrobial drugs, such as antibiotics.

People with compromised immune systems -- including the elderly and those with cancer, HIV or no spleens -- are especially at risk of potentially deadly complications such as organ failure. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of patients in those populations die as a result, Krause said.

The more prolific Lyme disease causes similar symptoms in early stage cases but is easier to diagnose by its telltale bullseye rash, said Dr. Barbara Herwaldt, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC who specializes in parasitic conditions.

Deer are pivotal to the life cycle of ticks carrying the babesia microti parasite by serving as a blood meal, shelter and a place to mate, Krause said. Ticks also feed on birds, who serve as carriers for Lyme disease, which affects the entire continental United States. Fortunately for humans, birds don't carry babesia microti.

Krause noted that ticks need a moist climate to thrive, so dry states such as Arizona are not likely to see babesiosis cases caused by tick bites. But the disease can potentially spread to all states in an even sneakier way -- through the blood supply.

Although a blood screening test is in trials, Krause said, donors are currently only asked if they have had babesiosis, and those who harbored it but never showed symptoms can pass it through their donated blood. And because most blood recipients are already physically compromised, babesiosis has about a 30 percent mortality rate in that group, he said.

"Getting babesiosis through the blood supply is a rare event and people shouldn't panic," he said. "I don't think it will reach a crisis level, but it's still a concern."

To help prevent babesiosis, the CDC advises people with compromised immune systems or other vulnerabilities to avoid tick-infested wooded areas, particularly during warm months. The agency also recommends that everyone walk in the middle of trails and avoid bushy areas with lots of leaves or tall grasses and to use the repellent DEET and pre-treat clothes with an insect repellent containing permethrin before going outdoors.

The CDC also recommends doing full-body checks and showering within a few hours of being in the woods, as well as tossing used clothes in the dryer to kill any ticks that might be hiding there.

The authors of the study also advised clinicians to consider babesiosis in patients who have been exposed to ticks or received blood products and who show up for treatment with a fever and anemia resulting from the destruction of red blood cells.

American Red Cross and the Blood Supply

2011-05-31T20:45:00.003-06:00

Hi everyone,

A new video informs us that the blood supply is being checked for Lyme disease and Babesia. The direct link to this video is http://www.kare11.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=969796885001.

This is an interesting video and certainly is proof positive that Lyme disease and associated diseases are getting more attention. Thanks to KARE 11 television station in Minneapolis-St. Paul for this great piece.

Be well,

Richard

Great Article a must read!

2011-05-21T05:43:00.002-06:00

Hi everyone,

Please check out this great article from Hagerstown Magazine. The direct link is http://www.hagerstownmagazine.com/articleDetail.aspx?id=1737.

Once Bitten: Lyme Disease
For Lyme Disease Sufferers, Severe Symptoms Don’t Always Lead to a Clear Diagnosis.

by Rachel Pappas + photos by Jamie Turner

• • •

For 15 years, Hagerstown’s Sagittarius Salon & Spa Owner Marsha Knicley-Masood suffered brain fog, chronic fatigue and trouble breathing. The dozen endocrinologists, cardiologists and neurologists she met couldn’t offer a clear diagnosis, and doctors at Johns Hopkins Infectious Diseases Department assumed she had an infection, though they knew not what it was. Marsha, now 63, who once played 18 holes of golf, cut back to two holes, then to one, then couldn’t even sit up. “I’d come home from my shop Saturdays and get into bed until Wednesday when I had to go back in,” she recalls. “I felt so sick that even the sheets hurt.”

Lyme titer and Western blot tests, which identify antibodies the immune system produces to fight bacteria, found the culprit — Lyme disease. Maryland has the sixth highest prevalence of the disease in the country, and it is near epidemic proportions in Frederick and Washington counties — with the Washington County Health Department tallying 50 possible cases over a two-month period in the spring of 2010. Even so, the disease, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and contracted through deer ticks, is underreported in the region, say local practitioners. “Most medical doctors are not educated to recognize it, and there is no campaign to educate the public,” says Marianne Rothschild, M.D., a family practitioner in Mount Airy, Md., who also is certified in holistic medicine. Dr. Rothschild says it’s hard to recognize if you don’t get the bull’s-eye rash, a common indicator of Lyme, but one that 20–40 percent of sufferers neither get nor notice.

Marsha did not get the bull’s-eye rash and was shocked after learning of her diagnosis. “I had been tested at Johns Hopkins several times, and all tests were negative.” The disease is said to lay dormant for years in some sufferers, and Marsha’s symptoms didn’t begin until shortly after she caught spinal meningitis at 48 years old. Marsha and her doctors assume she contracted Lyme from a tick bite during one of her many childhood summers along the Potomac River, but the meningitis may have triggered an onset of symptoms more recently.

‘Under Our Skin’
While most sufferers are symptom free after a month on antibiotics, for some patients the disease is hard to treat. Even after her diagnosis and antibiotic treatment, Marsha still experienced vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue and chills. Recently, much of her pain was alleviated through three months of at-home, long-term IV therapy, in combination with herbs, probiotics and an infrared sauna. Most herbs are trial and error, but Marsha says she benefited from resveratrol, maca and others. Supplements such as vitamins B-12 and D3, alpha lipoic acid, glutathione and artemisinin have helped as well.

At her small practice, Dr. Rothschild sees two to three cases of Lyme weekly during tick season (spring and fall). She refers the toughest cases to Greg Lee, an acupuncturist, herbalist and co-founder/owner of Two Frogs Healing Center in Frederick. Greg says the biggest challenge with diagnosing Lyme is that it often looks like other diseases, such as arthritis, flu, lupus and fibromyalgia. “Another problem is that the medical community is going on old guidelines,” he says. “To this day, medical textbooks say treat Lyme with short rounds of antibiotics.” They say the blood must contain five of 10 antibodies for a Lyme diagnosis; however, more recent research suggests a patient can produce three or four and still be positive. “Some patients will go on for five years before producing more antibodies,” Greg says. “By then, the infection gets stuck in the body.”

Frank Boddicker is a classic case of Lyme caught late — eight years after he began seeing doctors who misdiagnosed him with everything from depression and flu, to sinusitis and hypochondria. The 58-year-old contracted the disease 30 years ago, before the medical community knew of Lyme. He believes he was infected after a tick bit him during a trip to Summit Point Raceway near Summit Point, W.Va., leaving the classic bull’s-eye rash days later. Frank was a fitness addict, lifting weights three times a day, running every morning, hiking and biking. Then, he was stricken with flu-like symptoms, debilitating fatigue and later Bells Palsy, also associated with Lyme.

Today, Frank lives in a trailer in the woods outside of Knoxville and is on disability because, even now, his fatigue won’t subside. “I finally found a doctor that put me on long-term antibiotics. It put me back to where I’d been for three years. I was able to go back to work.” Frank says rest and supplements have helped, as well as avoiding gluten, dairy and shellfish. “But having the infection for so long and my age have caught up with me, and I have slipped.”

For years Frank has reached out to other Lyme sufferers. He started support groups in Frederick and Hagerstown but shut them both down when members became too sick to attend. Frank still fields calls from patients throughout the Washington, D.C., Baltimore and West Virginia areas, offering advice on supplements and probiotics, and encouraging callers to find a “Lyme-literate doctor.” Marsha, too, is a strong advocate of Lyme disease awareness. At Sagittarius, she sells a film called “Under Our Skin,” an Academy Award-nominated documentary that educates viewers on diagnosis, treatment and how to find a Lyme specialist. “People I don’t even know call me every week,” she says. “I tell them to see ‘Under Our Skin’ and read ‘Cure Unknown.’ They’re excellent sources for learning how to get good care. And, when you read about others who’ve experienced it, you don’t feel so crazy.”

The Sooner, The Better
Jon Weaver is one of the lucky guys; his Lyme disease was caught fairly early. The 35-year-old Frederick resident contracted Lyme in 2007. “My symptoms began in winter, which is an odd time to get Lyme because we aren’t outside a lot and ticks aren’t active,” he says. Jon’s initial symptom was a constant tightness in his right knee, which continued to get worse. “It filled with fluid, and later my left elbow got a large, swollen puss ball on it.”

Jon thought his ailment was a soccer injury. “Being a typical guy, I figured it would go away and waited two months to see a doctor.” He then endured three grueling months of doctors’ visits and misdiagnoses, even after blood work and an MRI. Jon was scheduled for knee surgery, until the orthopedic surgeon he was referred to discovered the problem was actually Lyme disease and began treatment. “About three months after I started antibiotics I was able to hike, then jog and finally got back on the bike,” Jon says. “Getting to normal speed and strength took four months.” He’s been symptom free for several years and was told he is cured.

Doctors say more accurate tests for diagnosing the disease are in the works, including those that screen for newly identified mutations found in people with Lyme, but they are years from FDA approval. In the meantime, it is important to remember to be your own strongest health advocate. Dr. Rothschild urges anyone bitten to take the tick to Clongen Labs in Germantown, Md. “Patients can download information on Clongen’s site on what to do. I urge them to take the situation in their own hands.” Jon advises anyone with flu-like symptoms and persistent fatigue to do their homework, and consider Lyme disease as a possible ailment. “Don’t let [doctors] shrug it off,” he says. “Get a test, and get a second opinion on the results.”

• • •

A Closer Look
Knowledge is Power When It Comes to Recognizing and Treating the Symptoms of Lyme Disease.

Symptoms
• Often a red rash that looks like a bull’s-eye
• Ongoing fatigue
• Shortness of breath
• Intermittent aches and pains
• Confusion and forgetfulness
• Trouble with balance, digestion and sometimes heart problems (in severe cases that have gone unchecked)

To diagnose
• Patients should get a full panel of blood work, including the Lyme titer and Western blot test
• Take infected tick to Clongen Lab in Germantown for further testing. Visit www.clongen.com.

Treatments
• Antibiotics for 30 days if caught early, longer if the infection persists
• Vitamins
• Probiotics
• Lymphatic drainage
• Detox techniques such as infrared sauna and brushing. Brushing is circular motions with a hand-held brush starting at the feet, working up toward the heart, followed by brushing the arms, again working toward the heart.
• A diet that is low in or free of dairy and gluten, free of shellfish, and includes meats without hormones and preservatives

For more information on the symptoms, diagnosis procedures and treatments for Lyme disease, visit www.cdc.gov.

• • •

Ticked Off
Guard Against Ticks and Bites With These Helpful Tips.

Ticks prefer to live in wooded areas, low-growing grasslands, seashores and yards. Lyme disease is a year-round problem, although April through October is considered tick season, with ticks being very active in the spring and early summer. Limiting possible exposure to ticks reduces the likelihood of infection to tick-borne diseases, and a careful inspection and prompt removal of crawling or attached ticks is crucial. The Washington County Health Department recommends these precautions in areas where ticks are present:

• Wear light-colored clothing, which allows you to see ticks that are crawling on your clothing. Tuck your pants legs into your socks so that ticks cannot crawl up the inside of your pants legs.
• Apply repellents to discourage tick attachment. Repellents containing permethrin can be sprayed on boots and clothing, and will last for several days. Repellents containing DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) can be applied to the skin, but will last only a few hours before reapplication is necessary. Follow instructions carefully, and use DEET with caution on children.
• Conduct a body check upon return from potentially tick-infested areas by searching your entire body for ticks. Use a hand-held or full-length mirror to view all parts of your body — including under your arms, in your belly button, and in and around your ears. Remove any tick you find on your body.
• Check children for ticks, especially in the hair, when returning from potentially tick-infested areas. Ticks may also be carried into the household on clothing and pets and only attach later, so both should be examined carefully to exclude ticks.

Visit www.cdc.gov/Features/StopTicks for additional tips and information on reducing ticks in your yard.

Office Supplies, janitorial supplies, office furniture and more at Kmart.com

2011-05-05T11:01:00.000-06:00

Office Supplies, janitorial supplies, office furniture and more at Kmart.com

Loss, Pain, and Frustration

2011-04-15T15:08:00.002-06:00

Here is another article that we read all too often. It was authored by By Victoria Ross, Springfield Connection, Connection
Newspapers, Alexandria, Virginia.

Lyme Disease: Epidemic ‘Largely Ignored’
Governor’s Task Force on Lyme disease hears stories of loss, pain and frustration.

By Victoria Ross
Thursday, March 31, 2011

Tricia Platas, a Springfield mother of four, sat in front of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s Lyme Disease Task Force on Tuesday, March 24, clenched her hands together, and testified about losing her 9-year-old daughter, Amber Marie, to Lyme disease.

“It was a few months after her ninth birthday when we really knew something was wrong,” Platas said. “She woke up one morning in so much pain that she could not walk to the bathroom. This was a little girl who loved to laugh, loved to sing and dance, Amber was the light of our lives.”
Platas cried when she told the panel and 120 attendees how desperate she was to make the many doctors she saw with Amber to take her daughter’s “mysterious” illness seriously. In her frantic search for a cure, she took Amber to a doctor who strapped the little girl to a bed, and waved foul-smelling oils in her face. “Amber was screaming. I just can’t believe anyone would do that,” she said.

“I wanted them to treat my little girl right, so I wouldn’t always ask the right questions, or demand answers. I feel terrible about that,” she said. “You have to push for answers.”

Amber Marie Platas died on April 22, 2002, at Children’s National Medical Center.

Platas was one of 25 area patients and caregivers who testified about their experiences with Lyme disease at Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield. They shared stories of pain, fear and fatigue with the eight-member panel of health department officials and legislators’ representatives. It was the fifth public testimony hearing about the spread of Lyme disease in the Commonwealth.

Led by Michael Farris, chancellor of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, the task force will propose recommendations to the governor after its final hearing April 25. Farris’ wife and seven of his 10 children have been diagnosed with Lyme disease. The task force is comprised of physicians, wildlife officials, veterinarians and other experts.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 900 new cases of Lyme disease were reported in Virginia in 2009, a number the CDC acknowledges could be ten times higher due to under-reporting and inaccurate diagnostic tests. In Fairfax County, 250 cases were reported last year, according to the Fairfax County Health Department.

A deer tick takes about 36 hours to transmit Lyme disease, according to the CDC. The longer the disease goes undiagnosed and untreated, the greater the chances are for brain, heart and joint problems.

“We’re here tonight to listen to people’s stories, hear their recommendations and advocate for more public awareness and education,” Farris said.

A well-known constitutional lawyer, Farris is the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSDLA) and Patrick Henry College, a Christian liberal arts college that is aimed at home-schooled students.

“Lyme disease is dramatically misdiagnosed, and there is too much denial by doctors that chronic Lyme does not exist,” Farris said.

Mikey Pedersen, a 14-year-old Vienna resident, told the panel that his case of Lyme disease went undiagnosed for a year despite seven doctor visits. He said doctors attributed his symptoms to growing pains. The delayed diagnosis allowed Lyme and co-infections to spread throughout his body causing rashes, severe joint pain, and fatigue.

Kristina Sheridan, a Vienna mother of a teenage daughter with Lyme disease, told the panel her family spent four years seeing 30 doctors, visiting seven hospitals and receiving more than 15 diagnoses before they found a team of doctors determined to get her daughter well.

She gave the panel a list of specific recommendations for the panel to consider, including spraying the edges of school fields and soccer fields with Permethrin, an insect repellant, to kill ticks as well as West Nile Virus.

"I've no doubt both my kids got bitten by ticks on soccer fields,” she said. Sheridan also said parents of children diagnosed with Lyme need to understand the process for Special Education Certification for “other health issues.”

“This certification provides families and the school with the flexibility needed to handle the waxing and waning symptoms, the additional days of absence,” Sheridan said.
Sarah Beasley, a 29-year-old Fairfax woman, told the panel that she is living proof chronic Lyme exists. In 2000, she was a senior at James Madison University and participated in Army ROTC for fun. But then she started having serious muscle and joint pains.

“As soon as each day was done, I’d limp to my apartment and crash into bed,” she said. “My whole life, I had been a six-hours-kind-of-sleep-girl. Suddenly, I would sleep for 13 hours and wake up feeling like I had been hit by a Mac truck.” After 10 years and more than 10 different doctors, Beasley, the director of a local education association, said she is on the path to wellness.

At the end of her testimony, she dumped out a large bag of medications, herbs, supplements and vitamins. “Please understand that it takes all of these to keep me going in the way that I need to function,” she said. “Without them, I will be that girl that is confined again to the downstairs couch.” She added that she wants the panel to encourage research and protect doctors who actually understand “this spreading, debilitating disease.”

Marjorie Veiga, a Lyme disease patient consultant and mother of a teen daughter diagnosed with Lyme disease, said the biggest myth about Lyme disease is that it is easily diagnosed and treated.

“It is difficult to diagnose due to the unreliable screening tests and due to the migrating and remitting symptoms,” she said. “Also, ticks can carry multiple pathogens. If these are not diagnosed and treated, the patient may continue to be unresponsive to multiple therapies.”

“These heartrending cases of misdiagnosis, financial ruin, and social isolation are difficult to hear as we travel throughout Virginia,” Farris said. “But it is important to gather first-hand testimonies about the personal impact of long-term illness. One of our most important goals is to allow people to be heard.”

The final Task Force hearing on the educational needs in Lyme and tick-borne disease will be Monday, April 25, at 1 p.m. in Fairfax. The location of the meeting has not been announced.

“I was so moved by all the stories given at the meeting that night,” Platas said in an interview after the three-hour hearing. “It saddens me to see how many people are still being made sick by this horrible little bug.

Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield) attended the hearing, and has listed Lyme Disease Awareness as one of his priorities.

In 2009, Herrity, along with Supervisor Michael Frey (R-Sully), conducted a town hall symposium on Lyme disease at Centreville High School. He said he became concerned about the prevalence of the disease after hearing from many of his constituents afflicted with the disease.

“We have an epidemic that we’re largely ignoring,” he said, adding that he hopes the panel considers that one of their recommendations should be to pass legislation similar to that enacted in Connecticut, where doctors are allowed to prescribe extended doses of antibiotics without fear of malpractice lawsuits.

According to “The Connecticut Post,” passage of the bill in May 2009, which allows physicians to diagnose chronic Lyme disease, and treat it with long-term antibiotics was one of the “cornerstone moments of Lyme disease politics over the last decade.”

Similar bills have been introduced in Rhode Island Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York and Maryland that would compel insurance companies to pay for antibiotic treatment for chronic Lyme disease CLD.

“For Swine Flu, we went on full red-alert, but more people are afflicted with Lyme disease, and it’s time we take it seriously,” Herrity said.

Those who did not attend the hearings, but want to share how they’ve been affected by the disease may e-mail Farris at lyme@phc.edu.

Over the Edge

2011-04-15T04:44:00.003-06:00

Hi Friends,

I need to inform you of a great new book written by a woman who has struggled with Lyme disease. Her name is Brandilyn Collins and the book is titled Over the Edge. It is a suspense novel in which the main character struggles with Lyme disease. Here is a link to see for your self, http://www.lymedisease.org/news/touchedbylyme/overtheedge.html

This book is a great read so don't hesitate to get your own copy. You can draw your own conclusions about whether you think she had done a good job capturing the struggles of having Lyme disease.

Be well,

Richard

Lyme Disease

2011-04-06T05:53:00.000-06:00

NASCAR.COM TrackPass - Live in-car audio, race stats and virtual video for NASCAR races with RaceView, PitCommand and Scanner.

2011-03-27T14:36:00.000-06:00

NASCAR.COM TrackPass - Live in-car audio, race stats and virtual video for NASCAR races with RaceView, PitCommand and Scanner.

Lyme disease cookbook

2011-03-16T15:08:00.000-06:00

New Lyme Disease Cookbook Provides Delicious Recipes and
Encouraging Inspiration for Doctor's Healing Diet

December 1, 2010, Sunapee, New Hampshire -- The new book
Recipes for Repair: A Lyme Disease Cookbook, is now
available from Peconic Publishing, LLC.

The book includes 151 recipes plus practical tips designed
to help anyone feel better through healthier eating. It is
especially helpful for people with Lyme disease and other
ailments, as it supports the anti-inflammation diet
developed by Kenneth B. Singleton, MD, MPH, in his 2008 book
The Lyme Disease Solution.

Co-author and photographer Laura Piazza became familiar with
Dr. Singleton’s Lyme Inflammation Diet® when researching her
own chronic Lyme disease.
Laura asked her mother, Gail Piazza, to develop additional
recipes for the diet. (Gail has an MA from NYU in Food and
Nutrition and specializes in recipe development.) The
extremely satisfying results inspired the pair to propose a
companion cookbook to Dr. Singleton. Recipes for Repair: A
Lyme Disease Cookbook is the result.

"Gail and Laura have created a book that is not only
healthful, but also beautiful and easy to put into
practice," writes Dr. Singleton in his foreword. "Food-based
healing is possible, and Recipes for Repair: A Lyme Disease
Cookbook is a wonderful resource to help you accomplish your
healing goals in a way that’s highly satisfying to all of
your senses."

The authors worked with Dr. Singleton to update the diet
based on his experience using it with patients. The cookbook
includes fifty food modifications, a revamped description of
principles and practices, and new guidelines addressing
specific health issues.

The new recipes support the Lyme diet while being delicious
and appealing enough for everyone to enjoy. Clear, simple
directions, basic definitions and cooking tips, and
practical, money-saving suggestions help cooks with any
degree of experience. Dietary preferences are accommodated
by the inclusion of many vegetarian, low-sugar, and gluten-,
dairy-, or egg-free recipes, all highlighted and
cross-referenced. Beautiful color photos and a clear and
attractive layout help provide inspiration and encouragement.

Sample recipes and more information can be found on the
book's website:
http://www.recipesforrepair.com

Source:
http://www.recipesforrepair.com/news/press-release-120110.html

__._,_.___

Unlimited Movie Downloads- Legal!

2010-09-22T18:50:00.003-06:00

Hi my friends,

It had been a while since I have posted a product on the blog. Since many of you are Lyme disease sufferers, I thought i needed to post a product that you can enjoy. Almost everyone enjoys watching movies. Movies can be a great diversion for many of us having a bad day. Why not try this great new product I found. The name of the website is is MoviesCapital.com and it is a lot of fun. To give it a look and to see if it something you might enjoy, justClick Here!

Be well,
Richard

Dr. Jernigan's Blog Article

2010-09-01T12:48:00.003-06:00

Hi everyone,
Below is both the article and the link for the blog of Dr. Jernigan. Dr. Jernigan is a lyme-literate doc who has written some books and many articles about Lyme disease. Check out his blog and make sure you read this article.
Be well,
Richard
http://www.drjerniganblog.com/articles/infections/843

Why is Lyme Disease Largely Being Ignored?
August 31, 2010 in Infections with Comments (0)
Today I was asked the following question via a comment on my Facebook page
“In your humble opinion, WHY is media & gov’t ignoring the plight of over 2.3+ billion people in their suffering? Is it because of their involvement in bioweaponizing this bacteria on Plum Island or is it deeper than this? This is question many of us are plagued with… God Bless Always. Thank you.” Mary B.
Dear Mary, I have pondered this same question for the past 12 years that I have been helping people with this illness. While Lyme disease might have been a weaponized bug from Plum Island, it comes down to who is going to treat these chronically ill people in a hospital setting. In a hospital the human conditions are departmentalized into Neurology, Cardiology, Nephrology, Rheumatology, Infectious Disease, and every other ‘…ology.
Most chronic Lyme sufferers have virtually every system being effected to one degree or another, so unless the hospital is going to send these patients to every department there is no one in the their system who understand the totality of everything that is going wrong. The Infectious Disease docs don’t deal with neurology nor do the Neurologists deal with Infectious Disease and so on. So in reality no one wants to take ultimate responsibility for the multi-system collapse seen in chronic Lyme case. I believe the hospital system is down playing the infection of LD so that the Infectious Disease docs can put the patient on antibiotics for six weeks…declare them “cured” and then funnel each person to the next most applicable department to deal with their piece of the puzzle.
Every doctor can only go as far as they have been taught. Doctors can train in American Biological Medicine for up to an additional 2000 extra training hours beyond their doctorate to learn to deal with these incredibly complex multi-system illnesses. At this time there is not a Department of Chronic Illness in any hospital nor is there a specialty that focuses upon the complex inter-connections between every system of the body…only Biological Medicine docs are trained to handle everything from Infectious Disease to Cardiology to Neurology to Rheumatology, and so on.
As it stands, many doctors are so specialized in one aspect of healing that it is very much like picking one piece of a puzzle that has 1000′s of pieces and trying to determine what the puzzle picture is before putting it together. As far as I know only Doctors of Biological Medicine are trained extensively enough and have the necessary healing tools to put the puzzle of the chronically ill patient together.

Misdiagnosis- A Common Problem

2010-07-29T19:52:00.005-06:00

Hi my friends,

I have copied this article from Mercury News and Patty Fisher. It is another fantastic article of another victim of Lyme disease that was misdiagnosed. Isn't it truly amazing that are so many of us that are misdiagnosed. Hopefully, each of us in our own spheres of influence will increase the overall awareness of this awful disease. Fine articles such as this one written my Miss Fisher certainly shed more light on this problem.

Be well,
Richard

Fisher: After long struggle with Lyme disease, Bart's going home

By Patty Fisher

pfisher@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/29/2010 03:51:06 PM PDT

Updated: 07/29/2010 05:19:58 PM PDT

Click photo to enlarge

Bart Fenolio, left, gets help as he walks down the hallway at A Grace... ( KAREN T. BORCHERS )

Bart Fenolio still tires easily, needs a walker to get around and has occasional memory lapses. He knows it could take years for him to overcome the devastating effects of chronic Lyme disease.

But for a 70-year-old guy who had been told he was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and couldn't breathe on his own or pick up a cell phone when I saw him six months ago, Fenolio looks pretty darn good. And he is counting his blessings.

"I'm just so lucky to have a family and so many friends who could advocate for me," he told me Thursday as he prepared to leave the San Jose nursing home where he has been recovering since December. "I've lost a lot of muscle mass — I've got no buns — but I'm finally on the road to recovery."

In January, I told the story of the former San Jose State track star, classic-car nut and golfer who contracted Lyme disease from a tick bite but was misdiagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable illness. The longtime owner of a Campbell tropical fish store was bitten by the tick while walking his dog in Morgan Hill seven years ago and began to develop symptoms two years ago.

Only through the persistence of Heidi, his wife of 46 years, and their scientist son and social-worker daughter was Bart given a series of Lyme tests that came back positive. He says his doctors at Kaiser Permanente insisted he had ALS even though he began to improve with antibiotics, and he left Kaiser to get the

treatment he needed.

Fast-growing disease

Lyme disease, a bacterial illness spread by ticks, is the fastest-growing infectious disease in the country, with 28,921 confirmed cases and 6,277 probable cases reported in 2008.

First identified in Connecticut in the 1970s, it still is not understood. Tests for Lyme are notoriously unreliable, and it can masquerade as Parkinson's disease or arthritis.

After I wrote about Fenolio's case, I was inundated with inquiries from people with similar stories and those who suspected they might have the disease. I have been referring them to the California Lyme Disease Association at http://www.lymedisease.org/.

Since then the Fenolios, who retired to San Diego four years ago but came back to the Bay Area to find a Lyme specialist, have been living here, Bart in a nursing home and Heidi with friends in Saratoga. They have become strong advocates for Lyme education.

"We have met so many people who were misdiagnosed," Heidi said.

"There's so much of it out there," Bart added, "but people don't realize it."

Legislation that would provide more money for research and testing for Lyme is inching its way through Congress. But advocates for patients with chronic Lyme suffered a blow in April when a federal review panel refused to endorse the use of long-term antibiotics, saying that treatment posed too great a risk of side effects.

The panel's decision infuriated Bart and Heidi because they are convinced that the antibiotics he has been taking since October saved his life.

"Why withhold treatment when you've already got a death sentence?" Heidi asked. She is confident that some day Lyme will get the attention it deserves. But for now, patients have to fight for treatment.

"I always say we're just five years too early," she said.

The disease has taken its toll on the family financially as well as physically. Medicare has picked up much of the cost of Bart's treatment, but the Fenolios have spent about $100,000 of their savings.

"It's been a real journey," Heidi said, shaking her head. "I don't even know how to describe it. This week especially has been just horrible for him because he can't wait to get home."

At last, Bart's wait is over. This morning, he and Heidi are scheduled to fly to San Diego, where their daughter will meet them in Bart's 1939 Ford woodie wagon. A procession of woodies driven by members of the San Diego Woodie club will escort them home. Then Bart will be able to sit in his backyard by his koi pond, feel the ocean breezes, enjoy Heidi's veal scallopini and sleep in his own bed for the first time in a year.

"It will be so good to get him home," Heidi said. "Just to be able to hold his hand during the night, I can't even tell you."

Contact Patty Fisher at pfisher@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5852.

Living with Lyme Disease

2010-07-18T12:32:00.003-06:00

WMUR-TV, Channel 9, Manchester, New Hampshire has produced a great six part video production called Living with Lyme. It is a must view for anyone wanting an understanding of the severity of Lyme disease on a growing population of victims. Please take the time to watch these short videos.

Be well,

Richard

The entire program is available online in six parts:

Living With Lyme Disease Part 1 of 6 (7:10)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259080/index.html

Living With Lyme Disease Part 2 of 6 (7:15)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259091/index.html

Living With Lyme Disease Part 3 of 6 (10:57)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259097/index.html

Living With Lyme Disease Part 4 of 6 (8:35)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259277/index.html

Living With Lyme Disease Part 5 of 6 (5:44)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259318/index.html

Living With Lyme Disease Part 6 of 6 (4:29)
http://www.wmur.com/video/24259612/index.html

2010-07-11T14:17:00.003-06:00

Hello again my fellow Lyme sufferers,
Below is another great article which describes the all to often history of those of us who are inflicted with Lyme disease. It comes from the Lakeland Times from Wisconsin. No matter where across the country, the stories are much the same. Here is some more evidence that antibiotic therapy does hep people with Lyme disease.

Be well,

Richard

Begin Quoted article

Leah Gernetzke
Reporter

Friday, July 02, 2010

In a matter of weeks, John and Jillayne Waite watched their healthy, 30-year-old daughter, Jennifer Kane, spiral headlong into debilitating, mysterious illness.

Seven years later, she still hasn't fully recovered.

"No one should have to get sick like this anymore," Kane's mother, Jillayne Waite, said.

That's why they've become outspoken advocates against the culprit of her weakened state - chronic Lyme disease - by attending conferences and presentations by Lyme disease specialists and other health care officials.

The most recent presentation, held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Wausau Thursday, June 17, featured Diep Hoang Johnson of the Wisconsin Department of Public Health, and Ben Beard, the chief of the bacterial diseases branch in CDC's division of vector-borne infectious diseases, who gave an overview of the disease in its stages of severity, as well as prevention tips.

According to their presentation, about 28,921 cases of the disease were confirmed in the United States in 2008, with thousands more estimated to be unconfirmed or simply unreported.

"Now it's the most common vector borne disease in the United States," Beard said. "We often think it doesn't get the respect it's due. There's some 70 or 80 diseases and conditions reported each year to the CDC and we tabulate those ... Lyme disease is actually number seven on that list."

However, several Lyme sufferers at the presentation voiced the opinion that the CDC tended to focus too heavily on surveillance of the disease and recording the numbers.

"We're tired of the statistics," Waite said. "Dr. Beard was a good presenter, and did present a lot of facts - but he still wasn't able to answer the question, what can the CDC do to help someone like Jenn?"

Instead, she said they should focus more on developing and enforcing better diagnostic methods so acute Lyme disease doesn't have a chance to progress into chronic Lyme disease.

Both Beard and the Waites placed an emphasis, first and foremost, on creating better tests.

Beard estimated that the most common tests for Lyme disease, called ELISA and Western Blots, are only 50-60 percent accurate - and in fact, a 2007 Johns Hopkins study showed that as many as 75 percent of patients with Lyme disease test negative using these common tests.

Better doctor education is also key to early detection - many practitioners commonly believe that a bullseye rash, called erythema migrans, must be present in order to diagnose a patient with Lyme disease. However, according to the CDC, the rash is not present in all patients.

Lyme disease, known as "the great imitator, also mimics the flu and other illnesses such as lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and many more, making misdiagnosis common.

Kane was just one patient who slipped through the cracks after testing negative.

"I knew I was bit by two ticks, kept the ticks, but I never got a rash, so I thought, oh I'm fine. And then when I started to get sick, I said, 'could this be Lyme disease?' And I tested for it and came back negative," she said.

But two months after she was bitten in March 2003, she began to exhibit neurological symptoms, especially headaches.

"They were excruciating headaches, like a band around my head, exactly where your cranial nerves are," Kane said. "It just blows my mind now, knowing what I know, that doctors never said, 'oh, those are your cranial nerves, let's look into this.'"

She also became paralyzed and experienced Bell's palsy, or facial immobility.

"My whole body would be paralyzed ... I'd be awake but I couldn't move," she said. "It's scary. You're a 30-something-year-old person thinking you have the whole world in front of you and all of the sudden you're bed-ridden and can barely function."

Kane underwent a gamut of treatments, including cortisone injections, narcotics and a peripheral nerve stimulator that intercepts pain signals to the brain.

"They were constantly treating the symptoms. The bacteria from the tick was in my body. It continued to grow and grow," she said. "Your blood stream can only handle so much of the bacteria, and then it's like the apartment gets full and starts infecting other parts of your body. I personally have had problems with my bone marrow, my spleen and my heart."

At her lowest point, Kane said she dropped to 90 pounds and spent every day with her head under a pillow.

As a result of the pain, Kane could no longer help run Cedar Creek products, the business she owned with her mother, or enjoy the active lifestyle she once had.

"I was doing 20 trade shows a year, I was on the road doing sales," she said. "I was extremely active, my husband Eric and I loved to bike, mountain climb, hike, fish ... My son was two and a half when I got ill. He doesn't even really know the real me. It's kinda sad."

Kane finally had a breakthrough three years after the onset of the disease when she started going to a different clinic and a different doctor, who looked into her case carefully and put her on antibiotics. She also retested positive for Lyme disease.

Since then, she said she's slowly been able to get out of bed and interact with her family again, though her road to recovery is still long.

"I have hope again. It's been seven years. The first four were really, really hard because I didn't know what the next day held, I didn't know if there would be a next day," she said.

Kane is now on what's known as pulse therapy, which kills the bacteria every four weeks, in accordance with the Lyme disease's life cycle.

When the antibiotics kill the bacteria they release neurotoxin that causes extreme pain - a phenomena known as a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction.

Though Kane says she still has to overcome this pain every four weeks until all of the bacteria has been killed, in addition to many other lingering symptoms, she takes it in stride.

"It's tough, but I keep very balanced, and positive ... no matter how bad today is tomorrow could always be better. I have a positive attitude and a great support network," she said. "My family has just taken this under their wing, and my husband is my pillar, and I have a nine-year-old son who just brings light into the room."

She also wants to help spread the word about the disease so other people don't have to endure a similar situation.

"Thirty days of antibiotics will kill the disease in almost every human being if it's caught within the first six months. There's no reason for people to get sick like this," she said.

She is part of the Lyme disease awareness network, and especially advocates for better education and more accountability among doctors.

"The major Catch-22 is the CDC says, 'we don't give guidelines to doctors on how to treat,' and doctors say, 'we go by the CDC guidelines.' So the patient is stuck in the middle because the CDC doesn't have enough information from enough research to give definitive protocols ... Right now, the research isn't there for the chronic Lyme," she said.

This lack of knowledge has in large part contributed to the many years she spent without adequate treatment.

"I have had so many doctors tell me, you don't even have a disease. They tell me I'm looking for attention, it's all in my head," she said. "I'm not angry with them, they only know what they know ... and the personality of a person that becomes a doctor - there are very few that are going to say 'I don't know,' and the ones that can are the ones that are finding out about chronic lyme and are trying to help their patients."

However, she said knowledge about the disease has improved drastically since she first became ill in 2003. Now, she's working with the Aspirus network, with Lyme disease specialists and doctors at University of Chicago.

"I have a team of doctors who are willing to accept they don't have all the answers. The fact that that bridge has been crossed is amazing," she said.

She's also taking part in new, cutting edge research at Columbia University in New York.

"There's a lot of stuff out there that's very promising," she said.

Leah Gernetzke can be reached via email at lgernetzke@lakelandtimes.com.

End Quoted Article

Bloggers Guide to Profits

2010-07-06T11:57:00.003-06:00

Surprising Truth: Many Business Owners Are Using Blogs To Promote New Ventures, New Products, Establish Customer Relationships And Make Lots Of Money In The Process!

Here's what else you'll learn in this report...How blogging has given anyone the power to broadcast their message to the world.
The secret marketing tactic that is hiding inside each and every blog (that not everyone is exploiting!)

* Why businesses, small and large, are increasingly adding blogs to their marketing repertoire.
* 5 ways to explode your business with a blog.
* 8 rules you must follow if you want to have a successful blog.
* How something called "RSS feeds" can help you communicate with your customers even better than email!
* The secret to getting your blog listed in Yahoo search results free within 48 hours.

You can purchase and download your copy of this great e-book at http://www.rbowman838digitalproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=86">

Yet another Lyme disease victim !

2010-06-30T11:06:00.003-06:00

Hello again,

Below is another fine article which describes another's battle with Lyme disease. It is another testimony that progress is slowly being made but that there is a long way to go to finding a cure.

Be well,

Richard

Begin quote"
News
Long road back: Shippensburg girl’s battle with late-stage Lyme disease
Photo by C.J. Lovelace
Documentary to be shown this weekend details dangers, research
By C.J. LOVELACE
Associate Editor
Published: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 8:24 AM EDT
A tiny creature carrying an immensely devastating disease could be found right in your backyard.

According to the Centers for Diseases Control (CDC), Pennsylvania has recently become to most endemic region for Lyme, a cureless disease that in its late stage, carried by the bite of a tick, is very difficult to diagnose and treat because its symptoms are so diverse.

If caught late, it becomes more and more difficult to understand and defend against.

Four years in the making, one Shippensburg family, just one of many, has experienced the difficulties of battling Lyme first hand.

By the age of 16, Barry and Diana Holtry’s daughter, Heather, was progressively becoming more ill at the hands of this disease. Heather said her family remembered removing the first engorged tick from the top of her head when she was 5 years old in the mountains of Massanutten, Va. She wasn’t exactly sure if this was when she became infected, but what they experienced over the next few years was difficult to say the least.

Lyme disease is bacterial infection, complicated when co-infections are involved, which cause inflammation pain and swelling all over the body if not treated. It created confusion for the Holtrys, their doctors and great amounts of pain for Heather.

When the root answers to her physical symptoms were not able to be determined locally, the family was forced to travel long distances, as far as Connecticut and Washington, D.C., to meet with doctors and specialists in efforts to figure out what was affecting Heather’s body.

For Heather, when she was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease, it was a relief.

“At first, I was relieved because my journey had started when I was very, very young and we didn’t know what we were dealing with,” she said. “A diagnosis, to me, meant we could move forward … but that was kind of before we understood the whole picture and how deep it goes in the treatment and the effect it can have on your body. I have only been able to come as far as I have because of my faith and the way the Lord answered our prayer for guidance.”

If caught early, Lyme disease can be treated and managed in a fairly effective manner, but if it’s caught late, like in Heather’s case, it allows the disease to disseminate into vital organs, tissues and it “becomes a multi-system and multi-symptom involvement disease,” explains Diana.

It affected every single body system inside their daughter’s body, from her brain and nervous system to her cardiovascular system. Heather’s case was complicated by several co-infections and the Holtrys did not see evidence of two of the co-infections for the first year of her treatment because of the suppression to her immune system.

Heather began to have difficulty managing even every day tasks, such as walking, eating, sleeping. She was unable to string a sentence together and she developed short-term memory loss. Her mother and father recall several episodes when Heather suffered seizures, temporary paralysis and an endless list of symptoms because of the spirochetal load throughout her body.

Heather endured swelling of the lining of the brain and lost her vision until the swelling was brought under control. Migraines, joint and muscular pain, extreme fatigue, and the list goes on, said Diana.

It left the Holtrys with few places to turn for answers.

Because of the current time in history of Lyme, a politically driven disease, and the fact that science and new types of treatment are continuing to emerge, Heather’s parents said that the family became more like researchers.

“Barry and I did not know anything about Late stage Lyme; could not imagine that this disease could cause so many life-threatening complications, so much pain … but we prayed, we researched and we were led to our answers,” said Diana. “It is a long, journey home, but, Heather’s doctors tell her she is ‘stellar.’ We know her to be a beautiful role model of strength and faith. She is a warrior and our come-back kid. She is not alone; we have had the humble privilege of meeting many young people and people of all ages and walks of life across this nation who have suffered in similar ways because of the missed diagnosis.”

With the help of a diversified unit of doctors and specialists working together and constantly evolving information, Heather slowly has been gaining ground. She is on a long-term treatment regiment to include several physical therapies each week. Their goal is cleansing her body of the deadly pathogens that had affected so many of her body systems and a rebuilding of her nearly destroyed, severely suppressed immune system.

Today, Heather seems like your normal almost-20-year-old girl. She is in her second year as a part time student in the Fashion Management/Retail Bachelor’s program at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and is planning a Lyme disease charity runway fashion show in September that she plans to put on as a fundraiser to benefit a much needed grant funded research project through the Lyme Disease Association (LDA).

Diana says her daughter is on an anti-inflammatory diet and, because of a Lyme-induced chemical sensitivity, her doctors have determined her drug resistant. She is on a specific and intense protocol targeted at pathogens, toxicities, detoxification and laboratory identified deficiencies. Over time, Heather’s protocol continually evolves under the watchful eye of her medical team to keep her late-state Lyme under control, but because of lack of a cure at this stage, the fight against this disease has a long ways to go.

Heather’s case may seem unique, but it truly is not. According to CDC, only about 10 percent of reported Lyme disease cases are true diagnoses.

For this reason, the Holtry family now serve as volunteer national Lyme disease educators and on the invitation of the Shippensburg Church of the Nazarene and the Shippensburg Evangelical Free Church will be presenting a documentary entitled “Under Our Skin – The Untold Story of Lyme disease” this Saturday, June 26, from 3 to 6 p.m. at Premier Events, 429 E. Orange St., Shippensburg. Doors will open at 2:45 p.m.

The documentary, illustrated through several case studies, details the science and politics of the disease, teaches the viewer more about the disease, but does not instill fear.

“We do not educate by fear; we equip,” says the Holtry family. “We support what we present with science. We work with top ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) Lyme doctors, researchers, molecular biologists … this is what a parent will often have to go through in order to understand the right approach for their child, or if it’s a personal case, for their individual care.”

A “360-degree documentary,” according to the Holtrys, the film really educates viewers, creating a personal feel that doesn’t just relate facts.

“This is so personal yet, packed with truth,” said Heather.

“We need to be equipped to be able to advocate for our health and wellbeing,” Diana continued. “I think differential diagnosis is imperative because it’s a very confusing disease; physicians and citizens alike simply need to be educated.”

The documentary, which is not suitable for children but okay for teens, is free to the public and reveals the shocking human, medical and political dimensions of Lyme. Recognized nationally within a month of its premiere, it is produced by Open Eye Pictures.

Reservations are necessary to ensure adequate seating for the showing. E-mail SCentralPaLymeForum@yahoo.com to sign up. Be sure to include your name, phone contact information and the number in your party. If you do not have e-mail, call 717-532-7402.

Copyright © 2010 - The Shippensburg News-Chronicle

End quote

2010-06-28T13:28:00.002-06:00

Hi Everyone,
I hope you all are enjoying your summer. I enjoy fishing and I thought you might like to know how to become a better fisherman. I have a great e-book that can give you some tips.

If you are sick and tired of coming home from fishing trips empty handed, having to eat fast food instead of delicious steamed trout, then this will be the most important message you read today.

Let me tell you why:

There is more to fishing than you might have first thought. To be more precise, there’s more to the fish themselves and how they think, than you would have ever even considered. To learn this and more click on the link below.

Click Here!

Mysterious Lyme Disease

2010-05-16T01:32:00.002-06:00

Here is a great article from the Chicago Sun Times. It is another story of another life affected by this cruel disease

Be well,

Richard
Begin quote:

Shedding light on the mysterious Lyme disease
Patient suffered from painful symptoms of 'the great masquerader' until specialist got a handle on disease

May 5, 2010
BY CAROL SLEZAK cslezak@suntimes.com

When Michael Plahn suddenly began feeling achy and nauseous last Memorial Day, he assumed he had the flu. But when the nausea subsided a few days later, only to be replaced by extreme joint pain and a feeling of utter exhaustion, Plahn realized he was dealing with something else. It was time to see a doctor.

What followed for Plahn was a maddening journey through a medical system that was either unable or unwilling to diagnose and effectively treat his symptoms. Plahn, 38, had no intention of becoming a pawn in a political battle between doctors and insurance companies, but that's what he and an untold number of others seem to have become. They are people suffering from a debilitating illness that some doctors recognize as chronic Lyme disease, and other doctors don't recognize at all.
» Click to enlarge image
Chicagoan Michael Plahn, with infant son Oliver and fiancee Sarah Wilde, says impending fatherhood and other stressful events may have triggered his symptoms.
(Keith Hale/Sun-Times)

Plahn, a Chicagoan, lost track of the number of physicians he saw at a major Chicago hospital last summer, but remembers an internist, an infectious disease specialist, an allergist, a rheumatologist -- plus a few trips to the emergency room when his pain became unbearable. No one was able to diagnose his illness, but they all agreed that he didn't have Lyme disease.

"Early on I was given a Lyme disease test ... but I was told I didn't have it," Plahn said.

Plahn, founder of Life Skills Authorities, a company that helps people fight chemical addiction, recalls one ER doctor laughing at him.

"He said, 'I read your charts and you don't have Lyme disease,'" Plahn said. "He was insinuating that I just wanted to get pain-killers. You know, I know the signs of chemical dependency. I was worried about myself, too. But I didn't know what else to do."

Plahn's fiancee, Sarah Wilde, watched her partner go from an energetic, robust man to a sick and frightened one. His joints were swollen, his muscles hurt, his brain felt foggy. He lost 25 pounds, and most of his energy.

"He had been the picture of perfect health," Wilde said. "He'd built an entire business around helping others be healthy. And suddenly he couldn't even exercise."

Wilde, the director of partner management for Yahoo!, began researching Plahn's symptoms online, and came across something called "chronic Lyme disease." The more Wilde read, the more convinced she became that Plahn had chronic Lyme. But there wasn't a single doctor within this big-city hospital system that agreed. One specialist diagnosed "adrenal fatigue" and prescribed steroids. Another hinted to Plahn that his illness was psychosomatic.

Plahn recited the hospital's final words on the subject: "This was a strong virus of undetermined nature. He will have extreme pain for an undisclosed amount of time."

At his lowest points, Plahn remembers thinking, "Let this be cancer, so at least we can go after it and try to treat it."
'Lyme-literate' doctors

The medical profession agrees on this much: Lyme disease is caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi that's transmitted by tick bites. (The illness was named after the city of Lyme, Conn., where a cluster of the disease was found in the 1970s.) Although it has been reported most heavily in the northeastern United States, Lyme disease has been reported in every state, and across the globe. It can affect the skin, joints, heart and nervous system. Oral antibiotics are the standard treatment for early-stage Lyme disease.

Beyond that, things get tricky. According to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, a significant number of people who contract Lyme either are misdiagnosed during the early stages, or fail to seek medical attention, leading to a chronic form of the disease that requires long-term antibiotic treatment. But in guidelines first published in 2006, the powerful Infectious Disease Society of America maintains there is no scientific evidence to support this theory, and that long-term antibiotic use is dangerous.

In a review prompted by an antitrust challenge by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a special review panel for the IDSA recently upheld the '06 guidelines. (Blumenthal had questioned the impartiality of the guidelines' authors, suggesting they had undisclosed conflicts of interest.) Although the guidelines are technically not mandatory, many insurance companies use them to deny coverage for chronic Lyme treatment, creating a discouraging situation for patients.

"I don't understand why some doctors want to ignore that this is happening," Wilde said. "It's frustrating that they've turned a blind eye to it, or scarier, that they're saying it's something else."

The medical establishment says it's simply a matter of science.

"They are chronically ill, a little desperate and they are searching for answers," said Dr. Paul Mead, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We can all understand that. The question is: Is the treatment they are getting beneficial?"

Doctors who treat chronic Lyme, dubbed "Lyme-literate" physicians, are few and far between. Plahn travels to Fond du Lac, Wis., for treatment from Dr. Steven Meress of the Fox Valley Wellness Center. After about six months under Meress' care, Plahn has noticed significant improvement. His pain has subsided, his brain is not as foggy, and he has regained some energy. He feels like he is on the right track.

"With chronic Lyme, people think they are going crazy," Plahn said. "You think, 'I'm in excruciating pain, but could it be all in my head?' Could it be psychosomatic? I was open to exploring that. But whatever I have is very real. It came on abruptly and it was not leaving."

Meress, an internist whose practice combines traditional and integrated approaches, sees Lyme patients from 18 states and four countries.

"My patients on average have seen seven physicians over the course of 20 months before coming to me," he said. "They are sick and they are frustrated. Lyme disease has become a political battlefield, and the patients have been put in the middle of this. It's doctor vs. doctor, insurance company vs. insurance company. People have spent $15,000, $30,000 out of pocket to fight this disease. They've lost jobs, spouses, houses. Sometimes it's better to have cancer -- at least the treatment is paid for."

Why are long-term antibiotics necessary? According to the chronic Lyme camp, because the organism that causes Lyme disease is a complicated one that can hide inside human cells, and often is accompanied by co-infections. "This disease is not easy to treat," Meress said.

The chronic Lyme controversy has resulted in investigations of some Lyme-literate physicians by state medical boards. It also has spawned legislative bills in several states aimed at protecting doctors who prescribe long-term antibiotics to treat chronic Lyme.

"It's interesting that it's OK to give [the antibiotic] Doxycycline for five years for acne, but the IDSA suggests only 14 days for Lyme disease," Meress said. "Acne doesn't kill people. Lyme does."
'The great masquerader'

The chronic Lyme camp believes there is no reliable diagnostic test for Lyme, resulting in many false negative results. And Lyme symptoms can mimic those of many other diseases, including Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and ALS. The chronic camp calls Lyme "the great masquerader."

Take the case of a Colorado doctor named David Martz. He was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, in 2003 and given two years to live. Although he had initially tested negative for Lyme, he pursued treatment by a Lyme-literate doctor -- and the treatment reversed his symptoms and saved his life.

Some researchers believe patients diagnosed with rheumatologic and neurologic conditions, as well as multi-system illnesses, should be evaluated for chronic Lyme.

A 2009 documentary, "Under Our Skin," shed light on chronic Lyme while taking aim at the IDSA and the medical establishment. But the CDC, which links to the IDSA guidelines on its Web site (cdc.gov), stresses that sound scientific principles form the basis of the guidelines.

"Misdiagnosis is not in the patients' best interest," Mead said. "Yes, we don't know everything. And the patients feel abandoned and frustrated by all of us. ... Is it a persistent infection or post-infection complication? It's been studied several times and all available evidence indicates it's not a persistent infection. But because there was still concern that [patients] might benefit from longer-term antibiotics, several well-defined studies were conducted, and all showed there was no benefit."

From 1992 to 2006, the number of reported Lyme disease cases in the United States more than doubled, from 9,908 to 19,931. In 2008, there were 28,921 confirmed cases -- 108 of them in Illinois. It's commonly believed that the disease frequently goes unreported.

Plahn, an urbanite whose idea of camping is going to the Four Seasons, has no idea where he might have been bitten. But disease-carrying ticks are everywhere, Meress said, including in our backyards and on our pets. Plahn never noticed a telltale Lyme bull's-eye rash on his body, but that's not uncommon, Meress said, noting that fewer than 50 percent of infected people recall a rash.

Plahn learned from Meress that he had been infected for at least 18 months -- and possibly much longer -- before experiencing the symptoms that led him to seek help.

"It was in my bones, my lymph system, everywhere," Plahn said.

He believes that stress -- he was starting a new company, and Wilde was pregnant with the couple's son Oliver, who was born in September -- must have triggered his symptoms because "that's the only thing that makes sense."

There are still so many unanswered questions. For Plahn and Wilde, of course. And for the medical community as well. But like many others suffering from the illness, Plahn and Wilde are confident they've made the right treatment choice.

"At the end of the day we're just happy to have found something to help him feel better," Wilde said.

Yet another familiar story

2010-05-12T01:15:00.001-06:00

Hi everyone,

Thought you would enjoy this article from the Wichita Eagle.

Be well,

Richard

Posted on Mon, May. 10, 2010
Symptoms make Lyme disease difficult to diagnose
BY HURST LAVIANA
The Wichita Eagle

Bob Reichenberger was perfectly healthy last June when he drove to a pasture near Andale to adjust the sights on two rifles. "I'm an athlete," he said. "I work out. I eat good food. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I've never had any health problems."

Reichenberger didn't worry about the two ticks that bit him that day.

"I felt one crawl up my neck," he said. "I pinched it in half and threw it out the window. Later that night I pulled one off my head."

Reichenberger, a detective on the Wichita Police Department's gang investigations unit, said he was used to chasing down 20-year-old gang members. But over the next several months, he was debilitated by one of the tick bites.

He spent a week at Wesley Medical Center, missed two months of work, began experiencing paralysis and watched his weight drop from 175 to 140 pounds — all without knowing the cause of his mysterious and painful illness.

In December, when he finally was diagnosed with Lyme disease, he began what has been a long and slow recovery from an illness that's not often discussed in Kansas.

"It's a physically and emotionally devastating disease," he said.

Prime time for Lyme

Reichenberger said he was happy to share his story during what has been designated as national Lyme Disease Awareness Month.

As warm weather brings people outdoors, health officials say, May is a good time to learn about tick-borne diseases and how to take precautions to protect pets and yourself from them.

Janice McCoy, health protection coordinator for the Sedgwick County Health Department, said April through September are the prime months for tick-borne disease in Kansas.

She said there were 18 suspected cases of Lyme disease reported last year in Sedgwick County, and four suspected cases of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which also is spread by infected ticks.

"If not treated by antibiotics, they can cause long-term problems," she said.

The bite of a Lyme-infected tick often leaves a distinctive bull's-eye rash that can grow to 12 inches in diameter.

"That is generally the first sign of infection," McCoy said.

For the 20 to 30 percent of Lyme patients who don't get the rash, she said, diagnosing the disease can be tricky.

From three to 30 days after the bite of an infected tick, she said, a victim begins to exhibit symptoms that mimic many other diseases — fatigue, chills, fever and muscle pains.

"The best thing you can do if you think you have been bit by a tick and have the symptoms, is to see a physician,'' she said.

Kansas state epidemiologist Charlie Hunt said there were 16 confirmed cases of Lyme disease statewide in 2008, the last year for which figures are available. Cases are confirmed after two lab tests come back positive.

Three of the confirmed 2008 cases were in Sedgwick County, while four each were reported in Reno and Johnson counties.

"It's been a reportable disease here for many years," Hunt said. "The organism has been identified in Kansas. It's just not as thick as it is in the northeast.

"We know physicians are looking for it."

Difficult diagnosis

Reichenberger said neither he nor his doctor suspected Lyme disease when he first started experiencing symptoms — muscle spasms and pain in his feet and lower calves — about a month after the tick bite. If he developed the bull's-eye rash, he said, it was probably under his hair and he didn't notice it.

Over the next several weeks, Reichenberger said, the pain spread steadily throughout his body. Eventually, he said, he felt like knives were stuck between the vertebrae of his spine. He said he felt excruciating pain in every muscle in his body.

He was unable to sleep, he said, and prescribed pain medications offered no relief.

In November, after nearly collapsing at work, he was admitted to Wesley. While in the hospital, he said, doctors took blood tests and did an MRI of his brain.

"I had all kinds of doctors looking at me," Reichenberger said. "They just couldn't quite figure out what the problem was."

One doctor suggested that he might have post-traumatic stress syndrome after working 17 years as a police officer. Another diagnosed him with fibromyalgia.

"One of them thought I had Lou Gehrig's disease," Reichenberger said. "Others just flat out said, 'We can't find anything physically wrong with you. You need to see a psychiatrist.' "

After Reichenberger returned home, he and his wife began researching his symptoms, and they began to suspect Lyme disease. But initial tests to determine whether he had the disease were negative, he said.

In December, as he began to fear his disease would prove fatal, he made an appointment with a Missouri doctor who specializes in Lyme disease.

"He immediately diagnosed me as having all indications of Lyme disease," Reichenberger said.

He said tests performed at a California lab were positive for the disease. He said the pain continued during his first month of treatment, but that by February he began to show signs of improvement.

"I still have a few glitches here and there," he said. "But I'm strong again, and I'm pain free.

"I feel like I came back from dead."

Reichenberger said those seeking more information about Lyme disease can visit www.lymenet.org or www.turnthecorner.org.
Reach Hurst Laviana at 316-268-6499 or hlaviana@wichitaeagle.com.

© 2010 Wichita Eagle and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansas.com

Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2010/05/10/v-print/1306879/symptoms-make-lyme-disease-difficult.html#ixzz0nhGpaLHK

ISDA has again showed extreme ignorance!

2010-05-04T17:53:00.002-06:00

Hello friends,

I have to again report that the ISDA leadership has shown extreme ignorance in regard to the long term treatment of Lyme patients with antibiotics. I reference to you the Under Our Skin Blog at http://underourskin.com/blog/?p=738 concerning this matter. Jordan Smith, the park ranger featured in the film has written the ISDA a letter announcing his displeasure with the stance taken by this group again. This group continues to prove it is biased against current testimonies of Lyme patients. I have copied the text of Jordan's letter for you to read below:

Begin Quote

To the Infectious Diseases Society of America:

Almost twelve years ago, I was bitten by a tick at work, and contracted Lyme Disease and Babesiosis. Because of the job you’ve done at diminishing the perception of danger about tick-borne disease and pressuring doctors who treat it aggressively out of business, it took a year and a half and a nationwide search to find a doctor who would treat me.

By then I was dreadfully ill, and as a result I lost my job and my 21-year career. In my first year of antibiotic treatment I got worse. I pursued aggressive treatment for another six years, during which time I got steadily, if slowly better. During this time one of my two doctors was forced out of practice as a result of your work. Thanks to my heroic physicians, I am recovered after a nine-year battle with tick-borne disease. And I am now contributing to society, working, and raising my kids.

Your ineffectiveness and the extent of your compromise with the insurance and HMO businesses are noted. You and your work will be forgotten eventually, as we have forgotten the names of the opponents of Copernicus. Shame on you for the suffering you are causing on the way to your eventual obscurity as prideful scientists who called it tragically wrong. The monument to your life’s work is an unchecked epidemic.

—Jordan Fisher Smith, recovered victim of tick-borne disease

End Quote

Join Jordan and write your letter to the ISDA

Be well,

Richard

New Tick Carrying Disease!

2010-04-22T21:17:00.004-06:00

Hi my friends,
I am sorry to have not posted any new material for a few weeks. My wife had a knee replacement surgery and I have been busy attending to her needs. I am posting an article that you will want to read. Scientists believe there is a new disease caused by ticks. I hope you find it informative. Thanks go to the Wbkt.com folks for the info.

Be well,
Richard

Begin Quote:

Scientists Worry About New Tick-Carrying Disease
Posted: Apr 20, 2010 4:40 PM MDT Updated: Apr 20, 2010 6:07 PM MDT
Communic8
Submit More Information
Submit Pictures/Video

Reported by Kristen Elicerio
Email: kelicerio@wkbt.com

Tick season is here. This year, in addition to the commonly known lyme disease, area scientists are concerned about a newer, more severe one.

It's a bacterial infection called anaplasmosis. It's something that attacks a human's central nervous system.

A tick is a host of anaplasmosis just like they are of the familiar lyme disease. When they bite the disease is transferred.

Symptoms of lyme disease are gradual, beginning with a rash or muscle ache. Symptoms of anaplasmosis are a little more severe, starting with an intense headache that quickly gets worse.

Because ticks can carry both diseases, prevention for both is following common tips that many are already aware of.

"Wearing long pants. Making sure that you have white socks on, because then when you lift up your pants and look at your socks you can see anything like a tick or any other hitchhiker," said Stephanie Hanna, Conservation and Education Manager of Myrick Hixon Ecopark.

Experts say spraying large areas for ticks is not very effective, but that spraying yourself for protection is. To keep ticks away they recommend a bug spray with at least a 30 percent concentration of DEET.
If you do happen to get a tick bite, there is a proper way to remove them.
"The secret to it is to try to dig it out. And not to get the body part, but to get as close into the mouth part as you can, clamp it well and pull it out," said Dave Geske, Vector Control Manager for La Crosse County.

Ticks can sense the movement of humans and other large animals from about six to 12 feet away. If a tick is still roaming around when you find it, it hasn't latched on yet, and you just need to remove it from your skin.

Area scientists will be conducting studies this summer to learn more about anaplasmosis and determine exactly in what areas ticks are carriers of the disease.

End Quote

Health Care- The truth for a change!

2010-03-21T15:40:00.002-06:00

Hi friends,

I am sorry to go politics on you but I can't help it. With so much garbage being sputed out by this Administration, a voice of reason and truth is necessary. I hope you take the time to listen to how our freedoms are being stripped away from us. It is hard to get to the truth, but it is still out there. I am also grateful for the fact like men like Glenn Beck are passionately trying to keep the American people informed and educated. Mr. Beck is rooted with a great spiritual knowledge of things and he is blessed with the ability to teach.

Be well,

Richard

Dr. Dave Martz - A Lyme Disease Champion

2010-03-21T04:40:00.005-06:00

Hi My Friends,

My Dr. Dave Martz was one of the doctors that diagnosed and treated me for Lyme disease. Dr. Martz is a very pleasant man with a determination to find a cure for Lyme disease. He gave up his Lyme disease practice in Colorado Springs due to his illness but is now starting a new job as President of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. Below is an article from the California Lyme Disease Association which talks about Dr. Martz. The full text of the article can be found on http://www.lymedisease.org/news/touchedbylyme/372.html. Dr. Martz was responsible for starting me on Rocephine

Begin Article:
TOUCHED BY LYME: Dr. Dave Martz, who overcame his own ALS death sentence with Lyme treatment, will keynote CALDA conference April 24
15 March, 2010

As Dave Martz lay dying, an idea serpentined around his mind and would not loosen its grip: Despite the absolute diagnosis and the insistence of the doctors, including a world expert, that he was dying of ALS, despite his own vow to face things head-on and reject the lure of denial, Martz couldn’t shake the notion that possibly, just maybe, he actually had Lyme disease. (from "Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic," by Pamela Weintraub.)

Dr. David Martz is kind of a rock star in the Lyme world. You may have read about him in Pam Weintraub’s Cure Unknown, and seen footage of him in the documentary Under Our Skin.

His story is riveting. After a lifetime of good health and a successful career as a physician practicing internal medicine-hematology-oncology for 30 years, in 2003, Martz suddenly started experiencing strange symptoms. First deep fatigue, then profound muscle aches and body-wide pain. Soon he was too weak to get out of bed. As his condition rapidly deteriorated, his physicians gave him a devastating diagnosis: ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease). They said nothing could stem his physical decline and he would likely be dead within two years.

But events went in a different direction. As his health spiraled downward, Martz connected with a Lyme specialist who prescribed hard-hitting, long-term antibiotics. The gamble paid off. By the end of 2004, Martz was a new man. In fact, the doctor who had diagnosed him so definitively with ALS, now pronounced that condition completely gone.

Martz devoted the next two and a half years to a project that gave extended antibiotics to about 90 ALS patients, and demonstrated objective improvements in 15% of them. He has also treated more than 800 chronic Lyme patients, with good response and minimal side effects. That work is currently being written up for publication.

Martz is moving into a new phase of life now, having recently been named president-elect of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. His term will start in 2011.

Martz will be the keynote speaker at CALDA’s annual patient conference, “Getting Healthy Again in 2010,” on April 24. The event will be held at the Dougherty Station Community Center, 17011 Bollinger Canyon Road, San Ramon, CA.
End Article

Checkout a great source of information!

2010-03-16T19:14:00.004-06:00

Hi my friends,
I wanted to give you the opportunity to get a lot of great information at my E-book Store. I have a whole lot of titles and subjects ranging from the Bible to "how to stop bed wetting." Many of the e-books come with ready made Websites and Master Resale rights. All of the e-books are priced from $2.00 to $12.50.You are not going to find lower prices on these e-books anywhere. Make no mistake these are not cheap e-books in the way of quality and information. A favorite from the bookstore is "Bible Basics". It can be found at http://www.rbowman838digitalproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=28&products_id=207. Bible Basics is just what it sounds like - 13 Lessons designed to help ground you in the basics of the Christian faith. Whether you have been a Christian for years, are just starting out in your walk with the Lord, or are not yet a Christian but are seeking spiritual answers, these lessons will be beneficial for you. I hope you will take advantage of "Bible Basics" as well as many of the other variety of titles and subjects.

http://www.rbowman838digitalproducts.com

Be well,

Richard

Flawed Lyme disease Guidelines

2010-02-24T08:48:00.003-07:00

Hello my friends,
Below is a great article from Eugene(Oregon) Weekly(http://eugeneweekly.com/2010/02/18/views3.html) written by Phyliss Mervine. I hope you will take time and read it. I am sure most of you will agree with it and can add your testimony to the problems of having Lyme disease treated. It is about time, people have recognized that the existing guidelines to be done away with and new ones instituted.

Be well,

Richard

Flawed Guidelines
Lyme disease treatment options limited by conflicts and questionable science
By Phyllis Mervine

In her Viewpoint Jan. 28, Dr. Sarah Henderson aligns herself with the flawed Lyme disease guidelines of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). The IDSA treatment guidelines are highly restrictive, ineffective, and leave seriously ill patients without effective treatment options. The IDSA guidelines panel which developed the guidelines had serious and significant commercial conflicts of interest with vaccine manufacturers, Lyme diagnostic kit distributors, and insurance companies. The panel did not consider the interests of patients and their treating physicians, with the result that it placed commercial interests above quality of patient care.

The conflicts were so egregious that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an antitrust investigation into the IDSA guideline development process. In May 2008, the AG announced a settlement with the IDSA. In a scathing indictment, he concluded that the guidelines process had lacked important safeguards:

• Several of the most powerful panelists held undisclosed financial interests;

• IDSA failed to follow its own procedures for appointing the panel chair and members;

• The panel refused to accept or meaningfully consider information regarding the existence of chronic Lyme disease and blocked appointment of scientists and physicians with divergent views on chronic Lyme.

Under pressure of the investigation, the IDSA entered into an antitrust settlement agreement with the AG. The settlement agreement forced the IDSA to reconstitute a new panel free of conflicts of interest to re-evaluate its guidelines in a public hearing held on July 30, 2009. The panel is expected to make a decision soon. The settlement requires the panel to consider scientific research the prior panel had ignored and to consider divergent viewpoints. The hearing and the scientific evidence submission of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) which included approximately 300 pages of analysis and more than 1,300 pages of peer reviewed scientific evidence disputing the IDSA guidelines recommendations can be viewed at HYPERLINK "http://www.ilads.org/"www.ilads.org.

The IDSA guidelines severely restrict clinical judgment and deny patients access to treatment options. Despite the IDSA claims that its guidelines are “voluntary,” medical boards, insurers, hospitals, schools and even child custody agencies regard them as mandatory and IDSA members enforce the guidelines in unprofessional conduct actions against physicians who fail to comply. The IDSA uses the guidelines as a sword to drive its competitors out of business for non-compliance.

The hardship caused to patients by these guidelines is severe. A recent CALDA survey of more than 3,600 people with Lyme disease found that the average patient waited over four years, seeing multiple doctors, before being diagnosed and one third waited more than six years to be properly diagnosed. In addition:

• 90 percent had difficulty or extreme difficulty finding a knowledgeable physician to treat Lyme disease. About 51 percent had traveled more than 100 miles to obtain treatment, and 53 percent had been forced to travel out of state to obtain care.

• 54 percent had been treated and failed treatment under IDSA protocols. A resounding 81 percent stated that they would not consider being treated under IDSA protocols.

• More than 60 percent of respondents who failed to improve under IDSA protocols improved with additional treatment.

• 41 percent of patients were not able to afford the medical care they needed.

• 88 percent had to cut back on work, school and household activities; 50 percent had to either quit work or school due to illness, and another 11 percent went from full-time to part-time work or school.

Denying treatment to patients has huge public health implications. People with under-treated Lyme disease often lose their jobs and insurance. They go from being productive, taxpaying citizens to being bankrupt, disabled consumers of state-provided services, including disability benefits and special accommodations under Section 504 of the ADA. Children lose years of their childhood, missing important developmental milestones. They have terrible quality of life. Suicide is a not infrequent way out, accounting for 50 percent of Lyme deaths.

Several state legislatures have passed legislation protecting physicians who treat people with chronic Lyme disease from prosecution by state medical boards, and in several more states legislation is pending. The legislation will ensure that physicians are allowed clinical discretion to treat — including antibiotic treatment for longer than four weeks if needed — according to their best judgment and evaluation of the individual patient. Patients are entitled to make an informed choice of the treatment they prefer, based on their own personal values and situation, just like patients with cancer or other diseases. Anything less is inhumane.

Dr. Henderson should examine the evidence herself and not accept at face value the interpretation of powerful, self-appointed authorities who have vested interests to protect. As a public health officer, her responsibility is doubly important — human lives are in her hands. Sadly, because of the head-in-the-sand attitude of most Oregon health professionals, Oregonians have to travel to California to obtain care for Lyme disease. Patient advocacy groups she denigrates in her article have done their homework. I’m afraid Dr. Henderson has not.

--

Phyllis Mervine is president of the California Lyme Disease Association (CALDA), “Empowering Patients Through Advocacy, Education & Research,” www.lymedisease.org

Try Giblink Now

2010-02-18T15:07:00.002-07:00

Efforts to educate the Public about Lyme disease

2010-02-17T07:46:00.003-07:00

Hi my friends,

Below is a great article about how one couple's experience with Lyme disease is being used to educate people in their community about Lyme disease. A piece of legislation has been created to promote awareness of Lyme disease. I think you will enjoy this article!

Be well,

Rick

Begin quotation:

By Laura Dolce
ldolce@seacoastonline.com
February 11, 2010 2:00 AM

KENNEBUNK — The number of Lyme disease cases in Maine tells a story of its own: the reported cases in York County jumped 62 percent between 2007 and 2008, with the increase statewide climbing an astounding 645 percent between 2000 and 2007.

Those numbers prompted state Rep. Ed Legg, D-Kennebunk to sponsor LD 1709, a bill created to foster better awareness of the disease that has already garnered bipartisan support.
What is Lyme disease?

• Lyme disease is transmitted by the bite of a tick, and the disease is prevalent across the United States and throughout the world. Ticks know no borders and respect no boundaries. A patient's county of residence does not accurately reflect his or her Lyme disease risk because people travel, pets travel, and ticks travel. This creates a dynamic situation with many opportunities for exposure to Lyme disease for each individual.

• Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis. The disease is caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria (spirochete) called Borrelia burgdorferi. The Lyme spirochete can cause infection of multiple organs and produce a wide range of symptoms. Case reports in the medical literature document the protean manifestations of Lyme disease, and familiarity with its varied presentations is key to recognizing disseminated disease.

• Fewer than 50 percent of patients with Lyme disease recall a tick bite. In some studies this number is as low as 15 percent in culture-proven infection with the Lyme spirochete.

• Fewer than 50 percent of patients with Lyme disease recall any rash. Although the erythema migrans (EM) or "bull's-eye" rash is considered classic, it is not the most common dermatologic manifestation of early-localized Lyme infection. Atypical forms of this rash are seen far more commonly. It is important to know that the EM rash is pathognomonic of Lyme disease and requires no further verification prior to starting an appropriate course of antibiotic therapy.

Source: The International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society

Tips for preventing tick bites, courtesy of Joanne and Barry Tibbetts:

• Wear light clothing when outdoors, which will make it easier to spot a tick.

• Don't assume a trip to the mailbox is safe - ticks can be found almost anywhere.

• Be vigilant when working with purchased mulch, or when doing other yard work.

• Don't assume since the tick hasn't been attached long that you can't get Lyme. You can.

• Protect yourself with DEET-based sprays and your pets with products such as Frontline.

• Keep your yard well mowed to avoid high grasses where ticks like to hide.

• Educate yourself about Lyme disease and its symptoms.

Video:

But the numbers only tell part of the Lyme disease story. It's the people affected by the disease who bring those numbers to life, one story at a time.

Joanne Tibbetts is one of those people. The Scarborough mother of three daughters and wife to Kennebunk Town Manager Barry Tibbetts first got bitten by a tick 15 years ago when looking at houses in Alfred.

"I had no bulls-eye rash," she said. "I looked on the CDC site and I was told I had nothing to worry about."

As time went by, though, Tibbetts started to experience what she described as migrating arthritis and joint pain. Then, 10 years ago, after the family moved to Scarborough, things began to change.

"I had tremendous back pain," she said.

And worse yet was the fatigue.

"I was sleeping most of the day," she said.

As the mother to three active daughters, Tibbetts tried to find ways to work around the exhaustion. If she had to drive the girls somewhere, she would bring a pillow and a blanket and nap in the car once she got there. But as much as she tried to work around her health problems, it was clear she was struggling.

"Just being out in the garden was a big deal," her husband said. "We would try to walk a third of the way around the house and I would have to almost carry her back."

Tibbetts could barely make it to the end of the driveway without collapsing. For nine months, her husband said, she wasn't strong enough to walk to the end of their street. And the problems weren't only physical.

"I had a lot of difficulty with word retrieval," she said. "Cognitive problems."

Her doctor told her she was pre-menopausal, she said, that these things were natural as a woman got older. But Tibbetts knew better. A 2006 Lyme test showed some evidence of the tick-borne disease, but was still considered negative by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards. Still, it was enough to give Tibbetts some idea of what she was battling.

The Tibbetts searched for a Lyme specialist and eventually found one who was a clinical assistant research professor at Yale and a board certified neurologist. It cost them $900 for a two-hour visit and testing. But at the end of the visit, Tibbetts' tests were sent to Stony Brook University in New York and the results gave her the answer she was looking for: Lyme disease.

Today, Tibbetts is back to being able to take hikes and lead an active life, though vestiges of the disease remain. To reach this point, though, the family has spent tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to pay for extended antibiotic therapy, additional testing and homeopathic herbal remedies that Tibbetts has administered by a practitioner here in Maine.

They've educated themselves so thoroughly on the disease that when Barry Tibbetts was bitten by a tick in 2006 and began to exhibit symptoms over the next few years — despite a negative Lyme test — they knew they had to look beyond that initial test for an answer.

Barry Tibbetts had a Western blot test, which measures your body's response to certain antigens in the bloodstream. While the CDC mandates that a patient has to have five out of six particular bands on the test for a diagnosis of Lyme, his doctor saw enough in the results to conclude that he, too, had the disease.

The Tibbetts' story is all too familiar to Kennebunk's Linda Pearson. She, too, had a tick bite 17 years ago on Martha's Vineyard and was vigilant in watching for a bulls-eye rash that never came. Months later she was talking to a woman at a party about the extreme pain in her knees when the woman asked, "Have you ever been checked for Lyme?"

Pearson was, and after a positive test, went on antibiotics for a month. But once she stopped the medicine, her symptoms came back. She would repeat this pattern of treatment followed by a re-emergence of symptoms over the next several years, through a move to Maine and raising her sons. The pain — in her neck, in her legs — was bad, but she said the "brain fog" she experienced was even worse. And worse yet, she saw the same symptoms in her kids.

Today, Pearson said the family is working with an osteopath and taking Chinese herbal remedies and focusing heavily on their nutrition.

"We're doing a lot of immune-building things," she said, adding that while antibiotics fight the bacteria, it often goes dormant, only to strike again a few months later. Building the immune system, she said, gives you one more layer of protection of the disease.

Joanne Tibbetts said she, too, has discovered the same thing. She said everything from probiotics, thyroid medication and hormone therapy can be used to treat Lyme — if it's properly diagnosed.

Between the recurring nature of long-term Lyme and its ability to mimic other illnesses, from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to fibromyalgia, it can be a hard disease to diagnose and treat.

That's why both Tibbetts have spent time in Augusta recently, speaking out on behalf of Legg's bill. Legg himself said he feels the bill, which will name May as Lyme disease awareness month in Maine and change some local protocols for reporting and detection, will be a good first step in bringing more Lyme awareness to Maine.

"It's a big step forward," he said, "but it doesn't settle the issue of how to treat long-term Lyme."

The scientific community is still divided on that, Barry Tibbetts said, both inside Maine and around the country. But while that debate rages on, the Tibbetts said they at least feel like they're doing their part to educate others that Lyme has come to Maine to stay. It's a lesson they had to learn the hard way.

"This is not the world we lived in 15 years ago," Joanne Tibbetts said. "Don't assume you're safe."

End quotation

More Lyme disease controversy

2010-02-02T07:40:00.006-07:00

Hello friends,

For those of us who have Lyme disease, the controversy concerning the use of long term antibiotics to treat us is very important. Here is another article that explains these current issues. Thanks to our friends at New Hampshire Public Radio and especially to Elaine Grant!
I hope everyone will get involved in their respective communities to voice their experiences with this issue.

Be well,
Richard

Begin quote:

>

Lyme Disease Controversy Comes to the Capitol

By Elaine Grant

Created 02/01/2010 - 17:47

Teaser:

Lyme patients say whether doctors feel free to treat them as they wish is a life or death problem. Some scientists disagree.

Synopsis:

One of the most vitriolic debates in medicine has come to the State House.
Desperate Lyme Disease patients say they are fighting for their lives.
They say doctors who treat their illness with long-term antibiotics are persecuted by the medical establishment.
They want lawmakers to pass legislation that they say will free doctors to treat Lyme Disease as they see fit.
On the other side are doctors equally convinced that long-term antibiotics are both ineffective and dangerous.
NHPR health reporter Elaine Grant has more.

Transcript:

For years, patients suffering from a host of symptoms that they call chronic Lyme Disease have said they encounter difficulty getting treated appropriately.

With its so-called “bucket of symptoms” that mimic numerous other ailments, Lyme Disease can be tough to diagnose.

And for a variety of political reasons, it can be even harder to treat.

Consider the case of Cathy Kettman, a fifty-six year old mother of four from Bow.

Several years ago, she went to the hospital with chest pains – but tests showed no heart disease.

She developed numerous other symptoms, and for five years she searched for a diagnosis.

Cathy Kettman: They sent me to neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists, they sent me to Dartmouth, they sent me back and forth for nine months to Brigham and Women’s looking for a tumor, they were trying to rule out MS and lupus.”

At one point, she was so crippled that her husband had to carry her to the bathroom.

When they asked her family doctor to test her for Lyme Disease, the doctor refused to treat her.

Finally, a doctor in Maine diagnosed her with chronic Lyme.

And that’s the first point of contention in the debate over how to treat these patients.

At issue in the scientific community is the question of whether or not long-term, or chronic, Lyme Disease actually exists.

The Infectious Disease Society of America is a group of 8,000 doctors that sets the generally accepted medical standards for about 50 infectious diseases.

The IDSA says there’s no such thing as chronic Lyme.

Here’s retired Concord doctor Susan Savateer representing the group, testifying before the House Health and Human Services Committee.

Dr. Susan Savateer: “As physicians, we have to be very careful not to give patients a diagnosis of LD unless they meet clinical criteria. Patients with chronic symptoms, mostly subjective, musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, memory deficits, these are common symptoms in our society.”

The Centers for Disease Control generally agrees with the IDSA.

And both groups say there is no benefit – and a great deal of potential harm -- to treating patients with antibiotics for longer than four weeks.

Dr. Paul Mead is an epidemiology chief at the CDC.

Dr. Paul Mead: “The National institutes of Health sponsored several studies to evaluate, well, do antibiotics make these people better? And the answer was, not more so than placebo.”

Furthermore, Mead says, both the antibiotics and long-term use of intravenous drugs can cause a number of serious illnesses and even death.

And doctors who subscribe to the IDSA position say over-diagnosing persistent Lyme can lead them to miss other serious illnesses.

Patients could not disagree more vehemently.

The International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society directly opposes the IDSA.

ILADS says science shows that chronic Lyme is real and that long-term therapy can help.

But advocates say that, in the medical world, IDSA reigns supreme –and that causes doctors to fear following alternative guidelines.

They point to situations like that encountered by Kevin Young, a primary care physician in Plymouth.

Years ago, Young’s daughter came down with a mysterious illness.

She suffered from a variety of neurological problems including intermittent blindness, seizures, and cognitive problems.

Dr. Kevin Young: Over the next two years, she went from being honors English in high school to being unable to comprehend a newspaper article.”

Young sought help from specialists.

Dr. Kevin Young: “No one could explain her problem. During that time, I did follow IDSA guidelines. It was a scary time.”

Finally he gave his daughter antibiotics – for nine and a half years.
Today, he says she’s well.

But his treatment choice came at a professional price.

Dr. Kevin Young: A neurologist who saw my daughter not only questioned my medical judgment, but also threatened to report me for child abuse. He said due to our professional relationship over many years, he would not do that, but that does dramatize the conflict within the medical community.”

The conflict has become so nasty over the last two decades, advocates say, that doctors in many states, including New Hampshire, are afraid to treat Lyme patients.

Representative Gary Daniels: “This has had a chilling effect on the number of Lyme literate physicans who are trained or willing to treat Lyme patients…Many of our state residents are forced to travel beyond our state borders to find the treatment that they need.”

That’s State Representative Gary Daniels, a Republican from Milford.

He says doctors in other states have been prosecuted by medical boards for prescribing long-term antibiotics.

And although it’s never happened in New Hampshire, Daniels wants to make sure it won’t.

He’s sponsored a bill to protect doctors from prosecution by the Board of Medicine should they choose long-term treatment.

The New Hampshire Medical Society opposes the bill, saying physicians are already free to treat as they wish.

Lawmakers also question whether any other illness has received exemptions from medical oversight.

In response, advocates say the scientific community views Lyme differently.

And that has broader implications.

Pat Smith is president of the Lyme Disease Association.

Pat Smith: “We actually have cases where insurers have not paid for medical treatments due to the IDSA guidelines. We have cases where pharmacies have stopped giving patients their medicines because of the IDSA standards.”

Further complicating an already thorny issue is the question of the IDSA’s integrity.

Last year, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal settled an anti-trust case against the IDSA.

According to court documents, the IDSA Lyme review panel was found to have conflicts of interest, including ties to drug and insurance companies.

The IDSA is reviewing its guidelines, but no major changes are expected.

Legislation virtually identical to New Hampshire’s passed unanimously in Connecticut last year.

Similar bills are pending in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Virginia.

With 92 cases per 100,000 people, New Hampshire has the highest reported incidence of Lyme Disease in the country.

For NHPR News, I’m Elaine Grant.

Audio file:

NHT020110eg1.wav

End quote

A Common Lyme Disease Story.

2010-01-27T19:21:00.002-07:00

Hi Friends,

Here is another sad, but common story of those who are stricken with Lyme disease. This comes from our friends at the Deseret News in Salt Lake City.

Begin quote:

Chronic Lyme disease hobbles Spanish Fork woman

By Carrie A. Moore

Deseret News

Published: Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009 8:54 p.m. MST

SPANISH FORK — There's a price to pay when Shanon Ballard goes Christmas shopping, and it's much steeper than the exchange at the cash register.

Body tremors, slurred speech and exhaustion so severe she often spends most of the following day in bed are part of what she endures after a two-hour shopping experience. Unable to drive, she is always escorted on these increasingly rare excursions.

Pain is her constant companion.

Lyme disease — contracted from the bite of a tick no larger than a sesame seed — has ravaged her body for 15 years, Ballard said. But without the political clout of heart disease or HIV or breast cancer, people afflicted with what they believe is a chronic form of Lyme disease have no unified voice.

So when doctors tell them it's "all in your head" or insurance companies refuse to pay for long-term antibiotic treatment, Ballard and those like her either suffer in increasing pain and silence, or they seek out the few doctors willing to treat their condition.

For all her searching, Ballard couldn't find one along the Wasatch Front.

"I saw 10 to 15 different doctors," she said. "Their main diagnosis was, 'You're depressed.' They gave me Prozac and sent me on my way."

The symptoms of her illness have caused great distress that would be "depressing to anyone," said her sister-in-law, Ginny Johnson, noting Ballard had been previously diagnosed with both Crohn's disease and Parkinson's disease.

But both she and her family knew it wasn't simply a case of chronic depression.

As a registered nurse, Ballard had knowledge of and access to medical journals that allowed her to research her own condition. Following her diagnosis, she was treated for several weeks with antibiotics, which initially helped her improve.

"But I went downhill really fast after coming off it," she said.

Ballard tried short-term antibiotics again and contracted shingles last summer, which only intensified her pain and led to other, secondary complications.

As she continued seeking treatment and told several doctors of her symptoms and diagnosis, they said her case was too complex for them.

Ballard's loss of function has come in stages. It began with pain in her late teen years, followed by debilitating fatigue, digestive problems and, most recently, increasing loss of short-term memory.

In September, after her extended family members returned from a trip to Brazil, Ballard's condition had deteriorated even more.

"I think she scared everyone," Johnson said. "We hadn't seen the tremors before."

Earlier this year, as Ballard was researching Lyme disease, she came across a documentary film, "Under Our Skin: There's No Medicine for Someone Like You," which details the stories of several people whom specialists have diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease.

It details the political battle within the medical community over whether such a condition even exists — the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued guidelines in 2006 saying it does not — and how a few specialists who treat patients for it have been brought before state medical boards threatening to take away their medical licenses.

In the meantime, Ballard contacted Dr. Joseph Jemsek in South Carolina, one of the specialists featured in the documentary, who agreed to see her. During the first visit, he asked for a detailed account of her life, beginning with details of her childhood, she said.

"He wanted to know everything," Ballard said. "When I'd see other doctors, after about 10 minutes of talking, they were finished hearing from me and gave me Prozac."

Ballard said other patients who have all the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease have been similarly dismissed by so many doctors who seem unable or fearful of treating them that those who do treat patients now do so on a cash-only basis.

Many insurance companies have refused to pay for long-term antibiotic treatment for patients nationwide, and Ballard figures by the time her treatments with Jemsek are complete, the bill will total about $50,000.

Her husband works as a finish carpenter and general contractor, and to date, they've been able to handle the costs associated with her condition. But he's had medical problems of his own for nearly three months, making him unable to work.

At this point, Johnson said, Ballard's entire family is trying to raise the money to help with her treatment.

"I can't begin to tell you all the money we've spent to date, but now, all of our resources are exhausted," Ballard said.

As she remembers the long road of diagnosis after diagnosis and failed treatments over more than a dozen years, Ballard said she wants people to know the condition does exist — and that there is help available.

She believes there are many who are going through the long process she did to get a correct diagnosis, and she hopes that word of what she's been through may help some patients navigate the system a little better than she was able to.

Ballard would like the chance to continue being a mother to her three children, ages 11, 9 and 6, who have all grown up knowing their mom was different from other moms. Pent-up emotion comes to the surface as she speaks about them.

"They have been really great through all this, but there have been times when they worry I'll die," she said through tears.

Between her children and her "fantastic husband," the family has largely been able to function as they pitch in to do the work Ballard would do if her health allowed it.

Yet as painful as it has been, the experience "has brought us closer together, and I wouldn't give it up for what we've all learned," she said.

Even so, "I'm sure glad there is hope now."

Utahns with questions about chronic Lyme disease can find more information at www.utahlyme.org.

End quote

Check out my new Website!

2010-01-19T02:03:00.007-07:00

Hello Friends,

I hope you will check out my new Website, www.bowhuntingparadise.com. For those of you who enjoy the sport of Bow Hunting or Archery, this is the place for you. I will be adding more and more item s each week along with some new links and some new information that will help you be a better bow hunter. You can find a great selection of bows, arrows, bow sights, rests, arrow tips, and many other items. If you don't find an item on the Website that you need, please contact me and I will do my best to have the product available. Paradise is different things for different people, but for the bow hunter it is www.bowhuntingparadise.com.

Be well,

Richard

PersonalPowerline.com

2009-12-29T01:09:00.001-07:00

Have you heard about PersonalPowerline.com
yet?

They have got a P-A-Y PLAN that has never
been see before, and it is BRILLIANT!

They're paying out a full 100% on all sales,
and they are paying daily! All commissions
are sent directly from Member-to-Member!

Over $1,222,170.00 has been paid out already!

We have just launched a Major International
Brand Awareness Campaign, and as part of
that campaign, I'm offering to pay your way
into Level # 1 (a $47 value), but you have
to act right now!

Check out my site!

http://PersonalPowerline.com/?rbowman838
My User Id: rbowman838

The Power is in the P-A-Y PLAN!

Richard Bowman
rbowman838@gmail.com

Lyme and the use of Steroids

2009-12-29T00:16:00.004-07:00

Hello everyone,

The past month I have somehow injured my left knee and had to see a doctor about surgery. Subsequently,, he gave me an injection of cortisone etc. to help relieve the pain until I can get in for surgery. However, as he was giving me the shot, I was remembering an article by Br. Burrascano, a well known Lyme literate doctor. The article had stated that steroids were absolutely not advised for Lyme patients. I didn't say anything, hoping the article was untrue. Sure enough, I have been miserable ever since the day of the shot. I have been achy all over, the fatigue is back and I feel terrible. Has anyone else had the same reaction to steroid shots for their back or their knees? Have you had to refuse these types of shots for pain control? I would be very interested for comments on any experience you might have with steroids? At this point, I would highly recommend that you not use steroids at all cost. I will keep you posted as to their continued effect on me.

I hope all of you had a very Merry Christmas and will have a great New Year. Thank you for visiting my blog!

Be well,
Richard

"Under the Eightball"

2009-12-20T21:37:00.003-07:00

Hi friends,
I found an article in the New York Times that I think all of you will find interesting. It concerns a new documentary movie. I hadn't heard about it prior to this article. I hope some of you will watch this movie and comment back to us so we can learn about it.

Be well,
Richard
Begin quote
December 16, 2009
MOVIE REVIEW | 'UNDER THE EIGHTBALL'
On the Nightmare Trail of Lyme Disease
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

Defensible anger becomes indefensible incoherence in “Under the Eightball,” a heartfelt documentary that twists an emotional journey into an anti-establishment tirade.

Written and directed by Timothy Grey and Breanne Russell, the film chronicles their 18-month investigation into the diagnosis and treatment of Mr. Grey’s younger sister, Lori Hall-Steele, who died of Lyme disease in Michigan in 2008. As the filmmakers track the history and politics of the disease, test for environmental causes and watch over the patient’s decline, the first half of the film envelops us in a tender, visually compelling cocoon.

Then things fall apart, so fast and so furiously that it’s impossible to know where verifiable science leaves off, and conspiracy theory begins. Propelled by rage and a string of interviews — with doctors, scientists, authors — the film lurches from Project Paperclip (which welcomed German scientists, including bio-warfare specialists, to the United States after World War II) to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, from contaminated wells to Japanese germ-warfare experiments.

Taking aim against multiple villains — including Dow Chemical and the health and pharmaceutical industries — and appearing to parallel Ms. Steele’s lack of appropriate treatment with the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiments with black men and syphilis, the directors skid off the rails so extravagantly that there is no going back.

Unfolding like two very different films, “Under the Eightball” undergoes a midpoint conversion from fascinating bug hunt to nightmarish lecture. In the end, critical questions may remain unanswered, but Mr. Grey’s grief and frustration are incontestable.

UNDER THE EIGHTBALL

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written, directed and edited by Timothy Grey and Breanne Russell; directors of photography, Mr. Grey and D C Hayden; music by Mr. Grey and Gabe Clark; produced by Justin Blake; released by Andalusian Dogs. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 2 hours. This film is not rated.
End Quote

Need More Website Traffic

2009-11-27T15:19:00.002-07:00

Under Our Skin .. a possible Oscar!

2009-11-23T18:44:00.002-07:00

Hello everyone,

I saw this on for and wanted to pass it along to you about the movie, "Under Our Skin" that I hope most of you have heard of and taken the opportunity to watch. It has made the short list of 15 for the Oscar nomination. I sincerely hope this film wins the Oscar. It will do wonders for the increase of knowledge around the country for Lyme disease.

Be well,

Richard

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that UNDER OUR SKIN was selected as one of the 15 finalists competing for “Best Documentary Feature” in the 82nd Academy Awards®.

Unfolding like a real-life thriller, UNDER OUR SKIN exposes the hidden epidemic of Lyme disease and reveals how our corrupt medical system is failing to address one of the most serious illnesses of our time. Open Eye Pictures is thrilled that the Academy has honored the courageous Lyme patients and physicians whose stories are told in this film. And we hope that this nomination will help spread awareness about this devastating disease and serve as a catalyst for fixing our country’s broken health care system.

The Documentary Branch Screening Academy Committee viewed all eighty-nine qualifying documentaries during the preliminary round of voting. Academy members will now select five nominees from among the 15 titles on the shortlist, and Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2, 2010.

This was taken from the "Underourskin.com home page.

A personal note to all who suffer from Lyme disease!

2009-11-18T15:41:00.008-07:00

Hi everyone,

It has been a long time since I have made personal note to the Blog. I have been experiencing a flareup of My Lyme disease problems and it makes me realize even, even more, why we have to defeat this disease. It has been over 8 years since I was stricken with this awful disease. Since then I have gone through working at my business from putting in over 60 hours a week on the average to now having to stay at home. It is an adjustment not easily made. My attempts on this Blog and on the Internet to develop new businesses for me to do from home has been more than frustrating because of the small amounts of time I can work on them. Tasks which I used to do in a few hours, now take me several days of months to accomplish. As a result, a person ends up spending more money than they are taking in. As many of you know having Lyme disease is expensive and debt can be accumulated quickly. So the new business attempts, although starting to trickle in some income, are not doing what they need to do. Brain fog, insomnia, headache, extreme arthritic type pain, overwhelming fatigue, and many other symptoms don't make it easy to accomplish what you have planned in any given day. I am finding how important it is to focus on only one thing at a time, work when I can and then listen to what my body is telling me to do. Those who are experiencing these types of frustrations know and understand the urgency of finding doctors and specialists who ar qualified to treat Lyme disease. I don't know how many times I have heard doctors tell me that they know nothing about Lyme disease and how to treat it. It is if those of us who have this disease are supposed to go home and suffer the debilitating conditions it places on our lives. Why aren't doctors required to stay trained on diseases affecting their patients? This question remains as one of the many unanswered questions of the day. If we have Cancer, we can find specialists to help us. It is that way with most of the other diseases. But Lyme disease patients find little to choose from. Ironically, the ones who are trying to help us are embroiled in the CDC's failure to properly recognize treatments that are working for Lyme disease. Many are afraid of losing their license to practice medicine if they treat Lyme disease with working treatments. In the meantime, thousands of Lyme disease patients are stuck in the middle and continue to see their lives ruined. All in all, some days it becomes quite frustrating. Thank goodness most of us are fighters and we arise the next day ready to continue the battle. For those of you out there going through similar problems, I know how you feel and how much you want to get better. I will continue to try and continue my meager efforts to keep us informed about this brutal disease. I apologize that I have not posted more information in the past couple of years. I hope to do better in the future. If any of you have any concerns or you would like to comment, I urge you to do so. Your struggles are our struggles and hearing them from you makes us all feel better. The main purpose of this blog remains Lyme disease. Yes, I do post some products and services that I have found interesting over the past few years. I list the products only in the attempt to make a little money to pay my medical bills. You are under no obligation to purchase anything from me to visit this blog or to find Lyme disease information. The cure and successful treatment of Lyme disease is why this blog exists. As the holidays are approaching, may I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving, a Merry Christmas and a healthy and happy New Year!

Be well,
Richard

2009-11-03T14:50:00.001-07:00

Save Your Daughters

2009-11-03T14:43:00.001-07:00

2009-11-03T00:44:00.001-07:00

2009-11-03T00:39:00.001-07:00

Hits4Pay.com

2009-10-24T20:57:00.003-06:00

Here is another great site I have come across that you need to take a look at.

Still Reading Commercial Emails For Free?
Receive Emails On Topics That Interests You
And Get Paid For It!

If you have access to your own email account, you
can get paid. Refer others and get paid up to two levels.

Hits4Pay is one of very few highest paying advertising
program in the industry.

Signup for free and receive $10 as a Free Reward:
http://hits4pay.com/members/index.cgi?rbowman838

Richard

2009-10-11T06:30:00.001-06:00

"Want To Work Less And Make More
Money?"

Take the
"Monthly Money Sites Online Training Course"
today and start creating recurring income streams for your business
tomorrow!

Living with Lyme: Bacterium can 'cloak' itself - The Willits News

2009-10-04T20:57:00.000-06:00

Living with Lyme: Bacterium can 'cloak' itself - The Willits News

KSTP TV - Minneapolis and St. Paul - Bill Would Protect Doctors Treating Lyme Disease

2009-10-04T20:49:00.000-06:00

KSTP TV - Minneapolis and St. Paul - Bill Would Protect Doctors Treating Lyme Disease

Living with Lyme: Long, often debilitating treatment flouts IDSA 'guidelines' - The Willits News

2009-10-04T20:44:00.000-06:00

Living with Lyme: Long, often debilitating treatment flouts IDSA 'guidelines' - The Willits News

Reverse Phone Lookup

2009-09-23T06:15:00.002-06:00

Find out the owner of any cell phone or unlisted number. Results include name, address, carrier, and other details when available. Your search is confidential.

http://11a80efaz9bel1mgxnr56kjg45.hop.clickbank.net/

Click Here!

New smaller and lighter Sony Playstation 3 !

2009-09-18T20:58:00.001-06:00

New book concerning Chronic Lyme Disease Treatment

2009-09-18T20:47:00.005-06:00

Hi My friends,
Here is some info about a great new book regarding Lyme disease. I am glad to see so many fine books coming out to inform us about this terrible disease. I thank Connie Strasheim @http://www.lymebytes.blogspot.com for the post. Check out Connie's blog for great information about Lyme disease.

Be well,

Richard

(Begin article)

Thirteen Lyme-Literate Health Care Practitioners Reveal Their Treatment Strategies for Chronic Lyme Disease in New Book

Thirteen Lyme-Literate Health Care Practitioners Reveal Their Treatment Strategies for Chronic Lyme Disease in New Book
Denver, CO, August 30, 2009 --(PR.com)-- A new book, Insights Into Lyme Disease Treatment: Thirteen Lyme-Literate Health Care Practitioners Share Their Healing Strategies, provides people with Lyme disease and their physicians with current, cutting-edge information on the treatment of chronic Lyme disease and the corollary conditions that it causes.

It is a comprehensive resource, written from the perspective of thirteen Lyme disease experts, including eight Lyme-literate medical doctors (MD’s), two naturopathic doctors (ND’s), a “heilpraktiker” (or healing practitioner, as the German title translates into English) and one chiropractor and nutritionist. The training and education of the experts encompasses a broad range of disciplines, but most use a combination of allopathic, naturopathic, complementary and alternative medicine in their practices. Whatever their background, however, all are experienced in treating chronic Lyme disease.

The book includes each practitioner’s anti-microbial and detoxification protocols, as well as their recommended supportive treatments for the body. It also provides their perspectives on the challenges and roadblocks to healing.

According to the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lyme disease is the fastest-growing infectious disease in the US, with more than 20,000 new cases reported each year. The CDC estimates, however, that only one in ten cases is reported, which means that there could be at least 200,000 new cases each year, and perhaps even many more than that.

Lyme disease can be treated successfully with antibiotics when - and if - it is caught early, while the Lyme spirochetes are still in the patient’s bloodstream and can be reached by antibiotics. If the disease goes undiagnosed, the spirochetes, (which are related to those that cause syphilis), can infiltrate the non-blood areas of the body, such as the nervous system, brain, heart, joints, and cartilage. The disease then becomes a multi-symptom, multi-system illness that wreaks havoc upon nearly all of the person’s tissues and organs.

Once this happens, Lyme disease becomes chronic and difficult to diagnose. It may masquerade as a variety of other illnesses. Many physicians do not know how to effectively treat it. It devastates nearly every aspect of a person’s existence. ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, estimates that most chronic Lyme disease sufferers experience a level of disability equivalent to that of a person who has suffered from a recent heart attack. As chronicled in the recently released documentary, "Under Our Skin: There's No Medicine For Someone Like You," those with chronic Lyme experience so much neurological and cognitive dysfunction that they end up losing their jobs, homes, mobility, and, in some cases, their lives.

For those who have been recently diagnosed with Lyme disease or who haven’t received adequate treatment help through the means that have been available to them, Insights Into Lyme Disease Treatment provides a comprehensive variety of effective, in-depth solutions. For the practitioner, it provides cutting-edge information on treatments that has not been published elsewhere.

The information in this book was obtained through interviews with the following thirteen health care practitioners:

Steve Harris, MD
Steven Bock, MD
Susan Marra, ND, MS
Ginger Savely, DNP
Lee Cowden, MD, MD (H)
Ingo Woitzel, MD
Ronald Whitmont, MD
Deborah Metzger, MD, PhD
Pete Muran, MD, MBA
Nicola McFadzean, ND
Marlene Kunold, “Heilpraktiker” (Healing Practitioner, Germany)
Elizabeth Hesse-Sheehan, DC, CCN
Jeffrey Morrison, MD

These practitioners were chosen on the basis of their expertise and experience in treating chronic Lyme disease. After the interviews, Ms. Strasheim wrote the book’s chapters, collaborating with the practitioners in the editing process, to make sure that all of the information from the interviews was accurately represented. Each chapter is devoted to the treatment approach of a particular practitioner, and covers, to a greater or lesser degree, the following:

1) Anti-microbial treatments for Lyme disease and associated infections, including antibiotics, herbs, homeopathic remedies, plant stem cells and biophotons

2) Information on how to support the body’s systems, which is an integral component to healing from chronic Lyme disease. Particular attention is given to the immune, endocrine, neurological, digestive and musculoskeletal systems

3) Treatments for symptomatic relief. Solutions for fatigue, pain, brain fog, depression, anxiety and insomnia are offered, as well as others

4) Detoxifying Lyme biotoxins, mold, candida, heavy metals and other environmental toxins

5) Treating food and environmental allergies

6) Lifestyle and dietary recommendations for faster healing

7) Strategies for healing emotional trauma

8) Patient and practitioner challenges to healing

9) Factors that influence healing

10) Suggestions for how family and friends can help the sick

11) Which anti-microbial treatments work and which don’t

12) How to discern whether Lyme disease is primary in patients’ overall symptom picture

The Author

"Insights Into Lyme Disease Treatment" was written by Connie Strasheim, a Lyme disease sufferer and health care researcher. She is the author of "The Lyme Disease Survival Guide: Physical, Lifestyle and Emotional Strategies for Healing," a book that describes Lyme disease treatment strategies, as well as practical solutions for coping with the difficulties of chronic illness. Ms. Strasheim wrote "Insights Into Lyme Disease Treatment" when she realized that more information on how to treat chronic Lyme was sorely needed from the experts who treat Lyme patients. Prior to becoming ill from chronic Lyme disease, Ms. Strasheim worked as a Spanish instructor, medical interpreter and flight attendant. Ms. Strasheim lives in Denver, Colorado and is available for phone, on-line, and in-person interviews. She can be reached at: 303-949-3347 or via email at: connie9824@msn.com

(End Article)

Availability

The book retails for USD $39.95 and is available at: http://www.lymebook.com/insights-book-connie, or via Ms. Strasheim’s blog at: http://www.lymebytes.blogspot.com. It is published by BioMed Publishing Group.

###
Contact Information
Connie Strasheim
303-949-3347
connie9824@msn.com
http://www.lymebytes.blogspot.com

How to Choose the Dog That's a Perfect Fit for You.

2009-09-17T20:22:00.003-06:00

Great E-0book for those who love dogs like I do.

How to Choose The Dog That's a Perfect Fit For YOU!
A practical guide to guarantee you and your new
"man's best friend" enjoy a great life together.

Buy

This one is fantastic. Get Affiliate Jump now!

2009-09-16T16:03:00.002-06:00

Make A Full Time Income as a

CPA Affiliate With Affiliate Jump... Click here!

http://www.affiliatejump.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=878

Try Lightyear Wireless

2009-09-16T15:28:00.004-06:00

Hi my friends,

I had to run this by you again. With all of the cell phones and cell phone carriers out there it is hard to find something unique. Lightyear Wireless actually pays you for using your cell phone. Please check out this Website and learn for yourself. Lots of great phones and competitive cellular plans. Phones are easy to activate. The coverage area is fantastic!!!.

Give it a try!
Be well,
Richard

http://rbowman838.mywirelessrep.com/tour1.html

Check out Fotolia.com

2009-09-14T19:53:00.001-06:00

Check out this great site for the most beautiful photographs you have ever seen. Need pictures of something for your Website. This is the place to go!

Richard

New tick disease moves into La Crosse area (WI)

2009-09-08T20:31:00.003-06:00

I found this article about a new tick disease. I thought you would appreciate learning something about this disease. This is an area in Wisconsin, but we should all be aware of it if we see symptoms of it. As always, we appreciate the Lacrosse Tribune for great reporting. Here is the link for the full article:http://www.lacrossetribune.com/news/article_ded7b774-9b65-11de-9e68-001cc4c002e0.html

Be well!

Richard

By TERRY RINDFLEISCH | trindfleisch@lacrossetribune.com | Posted: Monday, September 7, 2009 12:05 am |

What is it? Anaplasmosis is a tick-borne disease caused by a species of bacteria called Anaplasma phagocytophilum. It was previously known as human granulocytic ehrlichiosis (HGE) and later as human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA).

How do people get it? Anaplasmosis is transmitted to humans by tick bites primarily from the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis) in the eastern United States and the western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus) in the western United States. Of the four distinct phases in the tick life-cycle (egg, larvae, nymph, adult), nymphal and adult ticks are most frequently associated with transmission of anaplasmosis to humans.

Where do most cases occur? About 600 to 800 cases of anaplasmosis are reported to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention each year. States reporting the highest incidence of anaplasmosis in 2006 were Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

La Crosse area health officials are seeing more cases of a new tick-borne infection carried by the same deer tick that causes Lyme disease.

Gundersen Lutheran researchers have been monitoring anaplasmosis the last three years and report 50 human cases in the La Crosse area.

The researchers have developed a test for the disease and have been testing blood samples in Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation's microbiology laboratories at the La Crosse Health Science Center.

"It is an emerging infection in this area," said Dean Jobe, researcher and supervisor of Gundersen Lutheran's laboratories. "In collecting ticks, we have found it in 10 to 15 percent of the ticks."

Only a few years ago, the disease was rare in the La Crosse area, he said.

"It is mimicking early Lyme," Jobe said. "We used to say we couldn't find ticks with Lyme south of I-90, and now we see plenty of ticks, and the same is happening with anaplasmosis."

Unlike Lyme, anaplasmosis is an infection of the white blood cells, he said. Lyme disease is primarily a skin infection that gets

into the bloodstream and spreads into the joints, Jobe said.

"We've seen an increase in anaplasmosis over the last couple years, but particularly more this year," said Dr. Todd Kowalski, a Gundersen Lutheran physician specializing in infectious diseases. "It's been on our radar for 15 years or more with cases in northern Wisconsin, but the last few years it has been emerging in our area."

Kowalski said symptoms are similar to Lyme such as fever, headache and body aches, but people don't get a rash with anaplasmosis.

"It's not a subtle disease," Kowalski said. "Most people feel worse, and it's a little bit more abrupt than Lyme with perhaps a higher fever and more severe headache and body aches.

"With anaplasmosis, patients don't wait as long to see their physician or go to urgent care or the ER," he said. "But it is a very treatable disease. "

Kowalski said anaplasmosis is treated the same way as Lyme with a tetracycline antibiotic.

"What's rewarding is when patients are put on antibiotics, within 24 to 36 hours they feel a lot better," he said.

He also said prevention measures and the tick season from early spring to late fall are the same for both diseases. Kowalski said the same person can get the two infections at the same time.

He said most La Crosse area primary care, urgent care and emergency medicine physicians are aware of anaplasmosis.

Gundersen Lutheran has conducted research on the disease and developed an accurate molecular test which detects a gene unique to the organism and it can be done rapidly, Jobe said.

He said Gundersen Lutheran also is studying the best time to use the test in the course of the disease.

Jobe said the number of Lyme cases has continued to rise every year due to a bigger deer population and mild winters.

"We have a huge deer population that supports ticks, and I think anaplasmosis has established itself in the area," Jobe said.

"It's a little too early to say if anaplasmosis will be as common as Lyme, but there is a growing concern it could become problematic," he said.

Posted in News, Local, Govt-and-politics, State-and-regional on Monday, September 7, 2009 12:05 am Updated: 11:56 pm. | Tags: Ticks

2009-09-01T03:57:00.001-06:00

VirualURL- Great Product!

2009-08-31T03:28:00.002-06:00

Fast Action Bonus #1

Get your hands on the ViralURL.com System for free. This is a $239.64 annual value and worth the price of this package alone.

You will get this Link Cloaker, List Builder & Profit Generator System that I use myself.

It will protect your commissions... build your list... instantly create profit for you!

Freebie Force- Take a look

2009-08-29T21:25:00.004-06:00

Hi everyone,

Take a look at these sites for some great free stuff and some of the best deals anywhere.

http://www.freebieforce.com/rbowman838
http://www.talkaboutfree.com/bestdeals
Copy and paste into your browser.
Enjoy,
Richard

Reality Networkers

2009-08-25T05:12:00.004-06:00

Hi my friends,

Reality-Networkers is not another get rich program. We’re not here to compete with other opportunities.

Reality-Networkers is where all new and experienced marketers gathered to contribute whatever they can to the entire group to truly maximize the potential of online marketing system.

With your own team of active promoters, it does not matter what kind of matrices are out there, and it does not matter what kind of bonuses they’re giving out, YOU will be able to take your entire team of people to join all of them, and finally be able to earn that millions of dollars in the last level of every matrices out there.

Copy and paste the following link into your browser and give it a try.

http://www.reality-networkers.com/marketingsecret1.php?refid=1644832

Thanks and be well,

Richard

A Great Shopping Experience!

2009-08-17T09:42:00.003-06:00

Hi friends,
Have I got the store for you! Great Notebook and Desktop Computers and much more. NextDAY PC is an awesome place to shop for your computer hardware and software needs. If you are tired of all of the other computer stores and sites and want a refreshing shopping experience, I invite you to try NextDay PC. You can even build your own computer. The site is http://www.nextdaypc.com/rbowman838

Enjoy shopping at NextDay PC

Thanks and be well,

Richard

Shop at a great Ebook store!

2009-08-15T14:02:00.004-06:00

Hello again everyone,

I have opened an E-book store with some great prices and terrific values on a myriad of subjects. These books are priced with the consumer in mind. Please stop by http://www.rbowman838digitalproducts.com to see for yourself. It is composed of 32 categories/niches, each filled with eBooks, software, scripts, videos & much more. I think you will like what you see. Remember www.rbowman838digitalproducts.com for great prices and values.

Thanks and be well,

Richard

A Classic Case of Lyme disease

2009-08-09T19:46:00.003-06:00

Hi everyone,

What a great weekend for good articles concerning Lyme disease. This is a story that is familiar with many who are battling this disease. This one one comes from California. Pamela O'Kane knows what it is like to have Lyme disease. Enjoy this story of courage and perserverence.

Be well,

Richard

(Begin Article)

Triumph of her will
smcmanis@sacbee.com
Published Sunday, Aug. 09, 2009

She wouldn't use the wheelchair. Anything but that. The bulky walker was bad enough, but at least she could retain a semblance of her former mobility.

Yeah, Pamela O'Kane was determined – stubbornly so – to get back to normal life after another stay at the hospital. This one lasted 10 days in the late summer of 2007, and doctors still had no definitive diagnosis to explain and treat the uncontrolled, episodic spasms in her legs and arms, the partial facial paralysis, the weakening of her reflexes and the troubling 35-pound weight loss.

O'Kane, a 48-year-old instructor at California State University, Sacramento, suspected that she had somehow contracted Lyme disease – a potentially debilitating infection transmitted by ticks – at some point in 2006. All the symptoms were there, and her Lyme disease specialist detected two co-infections that usually accompany the disease. But three times the test for Lyme disease came back negative.

Which frustrated O'Kane to no end. Here was this perfectly healthy woman – a national-qualifying age-group triathlete, no less – rendered nearly an invalid who could barely stand up to conduct her teacher education classes without succumbing to fatigue, breathing problems and spasms.

Specialists had tested her for a medical dictionary's worth of maladies. The spinal tap for Lou Gehrig's disease came back negative, as did the scan for multiple sclerosis. She saw her gynecologist for a cervical cancer test, a pulmonary specialist for a lung cancer screening, neurologists for all types of central nervous system disorders.

Negative, negative, negative.

One doctor even suggested anti-depressants, thinking O'Kane was suffering from psychological problems. O'Kane, however, knew the problem was in her central nervous system, not "all in my head."

Still, just before this latest hospital discharge, the neurologist at the hospital told O'Kane's mother, Virginia Wilbur, and her older sister Denise Wilbur DeTrano that O'Kane's condition would only worsen, and a wheelchair was advisable.

"They told me I was going to be disabled," O'Kane recalls. "They said it would get progressively worse."

O'Kane had other ideas. During the hospital stay, she had read a story in The Bee about women climbing Half Dome, that 2,000-foot-high granite monolith in Yosemite, and she vowed to do it herself within a year.

"Pamela, you can't even walk across the hallway," Denise told her. "What makes you think you can climb Half Dome?"

"I will," O'Kane said tersely.

A year later, she and Denise had reached the goal, arms raised atop the granite slab. Just for good measure, the pair ascended Half Dome again this summer.

But O'Kane says it took more than dedication and grit to get her body back close to pre-illness shape.

Rather, she had to put aside her skepticism and commit fully to a controversial Lyme disease treatment plan that she had hesitated to enter because she technically had never been diagnosed.

It involved long-term antibiotic treatment – open-ended, depending on her response to it – through an IV line implanted in her left arm. This goes against standard treatment recommended by three medical organizations: the Infectious Disease Society of America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Neurology.

In a 2007 study published in the journal Neurology, researchers found that for patients with neuroborreliosis (Lyme disease that affects the nervous system), the treatment was effective only during a 14- to 28-day window. Long-term use of antibiotics has been linked to side effects such as blood clots, bloodstream infections and diarrhea.

Yet many Lyme patients (and those, like O'Kane, who exhibited symptoms but were not officially diagnosed) report that a six- to eight-month regimen of antibiotics helped them. And San Francisco physician Raphael Stricker, who has treated 1,800 Lyme disease patients, says he's seen patients cured by long-term antibiotic use.

"For patients with persistent symptoms based on persistent infection, unless they're treated long-term with antibiotics, they aren't going to get better," says Stricker, who did not treat O'Kane. "There is a lot of evidence from animal and human studies that there is persistence in infection (with Lyme), and the only way to get rid of it is long-term antibiotics."

O'Kane knew that prolonged use of antibiotics could be harmful, but she also knew that it was effective.

She underwent six months of treatment from January to July 2007. While taking the drug, she still had hand and facial tremors and had yet to gain back weight, but the severity was greatly diminished, and O'Kane could go about teaching and participating in triathlons.

What gnawed at her, though, was the fact that she'd never been diagnosed with Lyme. All those negative tests couldn't be wrong, could they?

That summer, she says, "I decided to take myself off it and detox. I wanted to try this on my own. Everyone told me, no, no, no. But I said, 'This is it.' "

About two weeks off the medication, she called her sister.

"She said that her feet were turning in – foot drop like people with cerebral palsy have," DeTrano recalls. "Fifteen minutes later, she calls me and says, 'I can't walk.' I had to go and carry her into the ER."

After that prolonged hospital stay, the one in which neurologists said she might be permanently disabled, O'Kane was eager to go back on antibiotics. She recalls being in the Lyme specialist's office, and her feet were spastically moving so much "it was like I was tap-dancing on the floor."

Even with just the initial dose of antibiotics coursing through her system, O'Kane said she felt better. She tossed aside the walker and never used it again. Not long thereafter, she was running, swimming and biking.

She regained her strength and stamina, if not all the weight she lost. Still, through rehab with a personal trainer that includes weight training, O'Kane has 12 pounds of muscle mass, according to her latest hydrostatic weight test.

Ironically, after feeling better, O'Kane finally tested positive for Lyme in January 2008.

"She's a classic case," Stricker says. "The commercial testing for Lyme is, in a word, terrible. They miss more than half the cases. Compare that to the sensitivity of AIDS testing, which is 99.5 percent (accurate). The tendency is for doctors to say, 'I guess you don't have Lyme disease. It must be something else.' "

O'Kane just seems happy to have finally cleared the major health hurdle. Now back to running seven-minute miles and churning on the bike, O'Kane believes exercise has hastened her recovery. But she admits that she still has problems, episodic tremors mostly.

"It's like somebody who suffers a stroke and recovers, but only to a certain point," she says.

She's learned to deal with the new normal.

"I seem to have a high sensitivity for odors," she says, explaining her current state of health. "If somebody's mowing their lawn, I'll start to moan.

"It's strange, I know. And changes in temperature, going from really hot to really cold will set off facial tics and moaning.

"When I first started getting back to triathlon, getting in the water, I'd start to tremor. Every morning, just putting my hands under the water to wash blueberries, it'll set off the shakes. It's embarrassing, but I've learned to cope."

MORE INFO

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California's Lyme disease cases amounted in 2007 to only 0.2 per 100,000 residents. The disease is most prevalent on the East Coast but has been detected in 56 of California's 58 counties.

• What causes Lyme disease: It is transmitted by infected ticks carrying the bacterium spirochete. The ticks attach to human skin and feed on the blood supply.

• Early symptoms: Mild flu-like symptoms, usually accompanied by a red, expanding skin rash. Turns into chills, fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, muscle and joint pain, fatigue and heart irregularities. The rash can appear up to 30 days after the bite. Some patients report never finding a rash.

• Long-term symptoms: Arthritis and central nervous system disruption that can result in tremors and spasms, chronic fatigue, facial paralysis, numbness and tingling in the limbs, inability to concentrate.

• How to avoid Lyme disease: Stay in the middle of trails, avoiding grassy areas and contact with logs, tree trunks and fallen branches in forests. Tuck your pants into boots or socks and your shirt into pants. Use a repellent, such as DEET, made to combat ticks. Check yourself thoroughly immediately after hiking and up to three days afterward.

• How to remove ticks: Using tweezers, grasp the tick's mouthparts as close to the skin as possible and gently pull the tick straight out. Wash your hands and the bite site with soap and water. Apply antiseptic to the site.

Source: California Department of Public Health, Division of Communicable Disease Control

(End Article)

Thanks to the Sacramento Bee Newspaper for this article!

It's Those Deer Ticks Again!!

2009-08-09T15:14:00.005-06:00

Hi friends,
I found this article in the Centre View-Southern Edition Newspaper in Centreville, Va. As always I have included the full text so you can see how this community is dealing with ticks and Lyme disease. More and more communities have become involved in teaching and training their citizens about taking precautions when it comes to tick bites. The author Reed S. Albers does a great job in telling the story. I hope you will find it informative and enjoyable to read as I did.

Be well,
Richard

(Begin Article)

Victims Share Stories on Lyme Disease Effects
Panel of experts recommends precautions.

By Reed S. Albers
Friday, August 07, 2009

Mosquito and tick bites are common nuisances for those who enjoy outdoor activities in the summer, but as Manassas resident Becky Pannenton, 52, learned earlier this year, those annoying bug bites can lead to severe health problems.

"I just found out on March 6 this year that I had [Lyme disease]," she said. "I’ve had it for more than 18 years without even knowing. "

Pannenton and other Lyme disease sufferers listened as elected officials, county scientists and representatives of Lyme disease advocacy groups held a town hall meeting on July 22 in the Centreville High School auditorium to educate citizens about the disease.

LYME DISEASE historically hasn’t been a major issue for the Fairfax County area and is most commonly experienced in the northeastern United States. With approximately 400 new cases reported in Fairfax County last two years, panelists agreed it is time to take preventative action.

"One of the steps I’ve taken to raising awareness is scheduling multiple meetings about this issue," said Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield). "There’s been a doubling of Lyme disease cases in the county. My wife [was bitten by a tick] but we treated it. Not everyone is as lucky."

Another panelist, Fairfax County Health Department Supervisor Jorge Arias, who has a doctorate in entomology, said that in 2008, 13.56 percent of black-legged ticks in the county tested positive for the bacterium that produces Lyme disease compared with 4.48 percent in 2007.

The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, is carried by black- legged ticks, also known as deer ticks, and transferred to humans through a bite contracted while outdoors.

"[Ticks] wait in the grass for someone to pass by and then crawl up their legs," Arias said. "They don’t jump and it’s hard to tell they are on you. They’re very sneaky."

Early symptoms of Lyme disease include headaches, flu-like symptoms and nausea, but in later stages severe psychological, neurological and sensory ailments can develop such as depression, blurred vision and memory loss.

Deer are the most common culprit for bringing ticks into the neighborhood, Arias said. "There are deer everywhere in this area, deer are the ‘Metro’ system for ticks," he said.

Besides offering Lyme disease information, panelists also discussed preventative measures. Vicki Monroe, Fairfax County wildlife biologist, offered tips for combating ticks.

"Keep your grass short and free of leaf litter, and keep playground equipment away from the yard’s edge and trees," she said. "Always wear insect repellent, dress in long clothing when traveling through the woods and stick to the main trails."

Another preventative measure is to check your body daily for ticks. "Whenever you go out, check your body for ticks," Arias said. "You’re either looking for a new freckle, or a new one with legs."

If there is a tick on one’s body, remove by gently pulling it out with tweezers. "There’s old wives tales about using lighters, cigarettes and alcohol [to remove ticks]," Arias said. "They aren’t true. Just use the tweezers."

The local health department or veterinarian can test the tick for Lyme disease for free, panelists said.

EVEN ONE’S FOUR-LEGGED friends are at risk, panelists said. Pets should be equipped with flea collars and have their fur checked regularly for ticks.

For those who do contract Lyme disease, the experience can be painful and frustrating. Lyme disease is a controversial topic as some physicians do not believe that it is the cause of extreme symptoms.

"No other disease has ever caused such a divide in the medical community," said panelist Debbie McCabe, director of pediatric and family wellness at the National Integrated Health Associates in Washington, D.C. "It is the great imitator and can cause multiple symptoms that baffle physicians."

Even the circular bite mark that is left behind by a tick can be misleading. "Some think they have ringworm, but it turns out to be Lyme," McCabe said.

Adding to the confusion is that Lyme disease screening is not accurate. The most common test, the enzyme-linked immunoassay test (ELISA), misses 35 percent of cases in the screening process, McCabe said.

For some, the effects of misdiagnosis can lead to years of unnecessary suffering.

"In the early ‘80s no one knew about [Lyme disease]," said Pannenton, whose 18-year misdiagnosis led to severe medical problems. "It started out with flu-like symptoms and then fatigue, then the headaches and dizziness came in," she said. "I suggested I had Lyme disease to my rheumatologist but he wouldn’t discuss it with me."

Loudoun County resident Sharon Payne, 43, has suffered from chronic Lyme disease since 2005, and has found few treatments that help with her chronic body aches.

"In 2005, I was on an antibiotic treatment [for Lyme disease] that made me lose 35 pounds," she said. "I decided that wasn’t the best treatment for me. I now use cold laser therapy. It’s the same treatment that was used to treat [cyclist] Lance Armstrong [for cancer]."

Lyme disease can be treated, but there isn’t a universal treatment method for those who did not detect the disease in its early stages, McCabe said.

VARIOUS OUTREACH groups also are available for those dealing with chronic Lyme disease.

Panelist Monte Skall, executive director of the National Capital Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Association in McLean (www.natcapLyme.org), shared Information for those seeking help.

"I’ve had Lyme for 18 years and it gets harder and harder to deal with," she said. "I started this group because there was nothing out there for people with this infection. We now how five chapters in Virginia."

Support for those infected with Lyme disease isn’t just coming from advocacy groups but also on Capitol Hill.

Dan Scandling, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-10), delivered some hopeful news that lobbying efforts are paying off.

"A $6 million increase for the Centers for Disease Control budget will increase Lyme disease research," he said.

What To Do If Bitten?
Step 1: Don't panic.
Step 2: Gently pull the tick straight out by grabbing the tick as close to the skin as possible with tweezers.
Step 3: Place the tick in a bottle or bag labeled with the patient's name, address and date the tick was removed.
Step 4: Have the tick identified and tested by a lab, health department or veterinarian.
Step 5: Seek immediate treatment if tick tests positive for Lyme disease.
Sources: The National Capital Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Association, Fairfax County Health Department
(End Article)

©2009 Connection Newspapers. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy
1606 King Street ♦ Alexandria, VA 22314 ♦ 703-821-5050

Is your list still not very big?

2009-08-04T15:05:00.005-06:00

Hello my fiends,

You've got to see this...
it has got to be the fastest, easiest, way to build your list that
exists in the universe...
==> http://www.listhero.com/58001
It took me just 5 minutes
and 45 seconds to get it
up and running for me...
(see if you can beat that!)
and my list is literally
building itself on autopilot
AS WE SPEAK...
Jealous--?
==> http://www.listhero.com/58001
whoever thought of this
is a genius...
--Richard

==> http://www.listhero.com/58001

P.S. watch out for the "Secret Upgrade"
--if you get the chance, definitely take advantage of it. It'll make
your
version of List Hero MUCH better
than everyone else's...

Lyme "rage", is it real?

2009-08-01T16:13:00.004-06:00

Hello friends,

Lyme rage has been a topic much discussed in the media the last few months. For those of us who have Lyme disease I think we can understand how Lyme disease has affected our personality at times. Some of us are more affected than others. However, Lyme "rage" can be a real symptom and all should know about it. This article from ABC News is a good glimpse into the problem. I hope you learn from it.

Be well,

Richard

'Lyme Rage': Can Lyme Disease Affect Your Personality?
Roaming Ticks Can Carry Disease Linked to Physical Problems, Mental Madness
By ELISABETH LEAMY, JOSH GAYNOR and LEE FERRAN

July 30, 2009 —

They're tiny insects that can cause big problems. A rise in the number of ticks this year has infectious disease experts focused on the best way to treat the Lyme disease that the little buggers can spread.

Some 20,000 Americans are infected and treated every year, but countless others go undiagnosed. The illness has symptoms that include fever, fatigue and headaches, but if left untreated, Lyme disease can be more serious.

While there are physical symptoms of the disease that can include severe headaches, severe joint pain and even numbness in the hands or feet, many experts believe Lyme disease can rewire the human brain and affect personality.

"I'm convinced that Lyme in a chronic form can affect psychiatric issues, neurological issues and you can have neurological problems," New York epidemiologist Dr. Daniel Cameron said.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention notes that up to 5 percent of patients "may develop chronic neurological complaints months to years after infection."

Lyme disease patient Kelly Kulesz told "Good Morning America" she saw herself change overnight because of her infection.

"They put me on stage fright medications," Kulesz said. "Doctors thought it was obsessive compulsive disorder, but it's just not."

When Terry Jo Sedlacek went to trial for allegedly gunning down the Rev. Fred Winters in March, the defense cited his Lyme disease infection and it's contribution to what many call "lyme rage."

But not all experts believe Lyme disease causes such " target="_blank">radical changes in personality.

"The example I like to cite is if I have Lyme disease and I get run over by a truck, the Lyme disease didn't cause my broken leg," Halperin, said Dr. John Halperin, lead author on the new American Academy of Neurology Guideline on Lyme Disease Treatment.

ABC News medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard, who had lyme disease, said that the possibility of personality changes should at least be taken into consideration.

"It does affect the central nervous system. You can have behavior changes, personality changes," she said. "We have to listen and pay attention."

More Information on Lyme Disease

For more information on how to prevent, diagnose and treat Lyme disease, vist the Web sites below.

American Academy of Neurology for Lyme Disease Treatment

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Infectious Diseases Society of America

National Institute of Health

National Institute of Health

www.LymeDiseaseAssociation.org

Lyme Disease Foundation: www.lyme.org

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Do YOU want $45 - Right Now?

2009-08-01T10:36:00.001-06:00

Hello There,

SocialSiteCash (SSC) is going to tell you how.

This idea came while toiling around on
MySpace and several other social networking sites.

We have developed the idea into a full,
VIRAL, insane advertiser AND *really* passive,
residual moneymaker for YOU to use and
you get $45 while at it - no charges at all.
http://www.socialsitecash.com/ssc/rbowman838

It is FR'EE, it is super easy and will make
a huge impact on your goals online - NO KIDDING!

Just follow the easy tell-all instructions, and
it requires NO EFFORT at all! I know, because
I did it and I'm now telling the world...
http://www.socialsitecash.com/ssc/rbowman838

Thank you,
Richard Bowman

POLL: Have you ever been ripped off? YES / NO

Are there any Keith Urban Fans out there?

2009-07-28T16:33:00.000-06:00

What about Ticks?

2009-07-28T16:20:00.004-06:00

Hi my friends,

We haven't talked about the culprit of our disease very much, ticks! This is an article from the New York Times that discusses these horrible little creatures. I thought the article was interesting so here it is. Thomas Mather is the author.

Be well,

Richard

Yes, There Are More Ticks
Thomas Mather

Thomas Mather is a professor of public health entomology at the University of Rhode Island. He directs the TickEncounter Resource Center, a leading source on tick-bite protection and disease prevention.

Ticks definitely are a bigger problem than 25 years ago. In the northeastern U.S., black-legged (deer) ticks have spread well beyond former coastal haunts; in the southeast, Lone Star ticks are seemingly everywhere. The only good news is that dog ticks are far less common in domestic environments, probably due to wider-spread use of pet spot-on products.

Deer are the most important reproductive hosts for deer ticks.

The observed tick increase relates directly to deer populations, which are exploding in suburban and even semi-urban areas. Deer are the most important reproductive hosts for deer and Lone Star ticks. In Rhode Island, each deer produces about 450,000 larval deer ticks every year. Add a few deer and it’s no wonder that tick populations skyrocket. While the level of deer reduction needed is logistically and politically challenging, one potential solution we are working on is an anti-tick vaccine — to make humans or deer inhospitable tick hosts.
deerDeirdre Brennan for The New York Times Deer on Shelter Island.

As disease-carrying ticks become more common in the domestic environment, tick bite protection and disease prevention becomes a critical everyday need (at least during spring and summer). Effective everyday tick-bite protection strategies do exist but few people use them regularly.

Until effective broad-spectrum vaccines are found, social marketing may prove most effective at encouraging anti-tick actions. For example, changing the way people dress in summer — wearing clothing with permethrin tick repellent built in — can make protection easy, but this strategy is still not mainstream. Maybe just a few of the thousands of celebrities living within 25 miles of the Route 95 corridor from Washington to Maine could step forward and help out.

Buy MP3 Music at Amazon

2009-07-28T16:15:00.000-06:00

Spin Success.com

2009-07-25T11:12:00.001-06:00

Free! ! Money Making Website

2009-07-24T16:41:00.001-06:00

Hi friends,

Today you can discover how you could make $200 to $1,500+ a day online with your own FREE website.

I will show you how ANYONE – even complete internet idiot – can quickly & easily create over 4 profit-producing revenue streams – & start building their list – instantly online!

Get your free affiliate website now

http://expressaffiliatesite.com/amember/go.php?r=4153&i=l0

To Your Success,
Richard Bowman

P.S. By the way this fee affiliate website is FULLY-FUNCTIONAL. Not like other affiliate sites, you may have seen, where after you create account almost everything is disabled until you get “Pro” version. This is not the case with this free affiliate site. You will get fully function affiliate site and you do not have to buy any “Pro” version.

What is Ehrlichiosis?

2009-07-23T21:06:00.002-06:00

Hello again,
There are many other diseases that can be associated with the dreadful tick bite. Most are very serious and need to be given much attention. Ehrilichiosis is one of these diseases. This is an article from the Glasgow Daily Times by Lisa Strange and it explains the plight of one young mother and her child with this disease. I hope you pay close attention to the symptoms.

Be well,

Richard

Boy overcomes tick-borne illness

By LISA SIMPSON STRANGE
Glasgow Daily Times

GLASGOW July 22, 2009 10:44 am

— One local mother hopes she can help keep other parents and their children from going through what she and her son faced recently.
Valerie Lewis found a tick on her son, Parker, 2, on Father’s Day. She removed it and didn’t really think anything else about it.
Three days later, Parker had developed a high fever and was lethargic.
Valerie took her son to her local family physician, Dr. David German, who checked Parker’s tonsils and ears, but couldn’t find an immediate source of infection. He told her to wait a day and see if there were any changes.
Parker’s high fever and lethargy continued the next day and he had a febrile seizure, which consists of convulsions brought on by a fever in infants and small children.
Valerie took Parker to the emergency room at T.J. Samson Community Hos-pital and he was admitted.
Parker was given Doxocycline, an antibiotic, but his white blood cell count kept dropping and Dr. German realized there was “something different about this one.”
Parker was diagnosed with Ehrlichiosis, an illness carried by the Lone Star tick that is found in the southeastern United States.
He was treated at the local hospital for two days, but was not showing improvement.
The boy’s white cell count continued to decrease from 3,500 to 2,000 to 800, according to German, so the decision was made to send Parker to Vanderbilt Hospital, the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, in Nashville.
After Parker arrived at Vandy, he began to bounce back and was released after two more days of treatment there.
“It took four days to get as bad as he was going to get,” Valerie said. “After that he started bouncing back.”
Parker has now completely recovered with no lasting ill effects or organ damage.
“The doctors at Vanderbilt told me that Ehrlichiosis is especially bad this year in Tennessee and Kentucky, up 100-fold from last year,” Valerie said. “ The disease is potentially deadly (two children died from it while Parker was at Vanderbilt). It's important that parents think about tick bites if their child has an unexplained high fever in the summer with low white blood cell counts.
Valerie said doctors in Tennessee attributed German with quick thinking that helped Parker’s case be resolved with a positive outcome.
“He is the reason. They said Dr. German did everything exactly right,” Valerie said.
“I was just doing my job,” German said.
The thing to take away from all this, he said, is in the summertime, if a child 8 or younger has an unexplained fever of 104 degrees or higher that is not going away and a white cell count that keeps dropping, parents and physicians need to think about tick bites as a possible cause of the illness.
Other than that, German was humble about his discovery of the right diagnosis in Parker’s case.
“Praise the Lord he got better,” he said. “God puts those ideas in your mind at the right time.”

What is Ehrlichiosis?
Ehrlichiosis is the general name used to describe several bacterial diseases that affect animals and humans. These diseases are caused by the organisms in the genus Ehrlichia. In the United States, there are currently two ehrlichial species that are known to cause disease in humans: Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Ehrlichia ewingii. Ehrlichia chaffeensis causes human ehrlichiosis also described as human monocytic ehrlichiosis (HME). In addition, human infections with Ehrlichia ewingii have also been documented.
How do people get ehrlichiosis?
In the United States, ehrlichiae are transmitted by the bite of an infected tick. The lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) is the primary vector of both Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Ehrlichia ewingii in the United States.
What are the symptoms of ehrlichiosis?
The symptoms of ehrlichiosis may resemble symptoms of various other infectious and non-infectious diseases. The initial signs and symptoms generally include:

* fever
* headache
* fatigue
* muscle aches

Other signs and symptoms may include:

* nausea
* vomiting
* diarrhea
* cough
* joint pains
* confusion
* occasionally rash

Symptoms typically appear after an incubation period of 5-10 days following the tick bite. It is possible that many individuals who become infected with ehrlichiae do not become ill or they develop only very mild symptoms.

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

Great new site for purchsing computers, office supplies and many more products!

2009-07-22T11:35:00.005-06:00

Hello again,

I have a really great site for you to check out.It is called Nextday PC and you won't believe the amount of products available. You can purchase everything from Laptops and Desktop computers to hardware and tool items. The prices are very competitive and and the service is fantastic. My store is Rbowman838 Enterprises and I will be your account representative. it is located at http://www.nextdaypc.com/rbowman838. I hope you can find the time to take a look and see the variety of quality name brand products available.

Be well,

Richard

PPCwebspyware is a fabulous FREE keyword research tool!

2009-07-21T19:50:00.004-06:00

Hey my friends,
I hope you're having a great week so far. I wanted to take
a couple minutes and tell you about a free keyword research tool that marketing
guru, Brad Callen, just created.

Basically, you install the software and when you perform a Google search on any
keyword, it places a "view keywords" button directly below any Adwords advertiser's
listing.

If you click the "view keywords" button, you can see the keywords ANY Adwords
advertiser is bidding on! Plus, a bunch of other very cool stuff.

I've never seen anything anywhere near this powerful, especially being free.

You can download it here:

=> http://www.ppcwebspy.com/downloads/?rwb838
Make sure you go there right away, because I don't know how long this application
will be free.

EnjoY!

Richard Bowman
P.S. Here's the link where you can get the free Adwords keyword tool again:
=> http://www.ppcwebspy.com/downloads/?rwb838

NuLegacy "Free" Prescription Card

2009-07-19T20:38:00.003-06:00

FREE Prescription Discount Card!Save up to 75%at over 56,000 Pharmacies! Everyone qualifies. Use it immediately! Print yours online Today at http://www.rbowman838nulegacyrxcard.com. or http://nulegacy.apptrack.com/rbowman838

Sick from a tick.....another story about Lyme disease

2009-07-19T11:02:00.004-06:00

Hi again everyone.

It is time to talk about Lyme disease. Below is a fabulous article from a woman who struggled being diagnosed with Lyme disease. She was forced to do a lot of research on her own and took charge of her medical care. She was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease and Bartonella. Please take time and read her personal struggle. She is another victim of this terrible disease and her story mimics the story of hundreds of Lyme patients.

Be Well,
Rich Bowman

Cover Story - Friday, July 17, 2009from the Dannville Weekly.com

So sick from a tick
'Lyme disease could happen to you,' warns Diablo woman

by Sue Savod

It comes from a tick and it's on the East coast - isn't that what most people know about Lyme disease? And what's that got to do with us here in California? A lot. Because the fact is that Northern California is one of the most Lyme-infected areas in the U.S.A. I want to scream it from the rooftops! Be careful! We have Lyme disease right here!

In January 2008, I was exhausted and just plain felt sick. I went to my family doctor whom I'd seen maybe five or six times during the previous five years. He's a good doctor. He even asks me what I think is wrong before he checks me out. This time I didn't have a clue. He mentioned "virus" and did blood tests. I even asked to be tested for Lyme - I must have read it somewhere. There were lots of reasons for me to be run down as I had been very busy the fall before with my daughter's wedding and finishing a new house. Christmas did me in.

The tests came back - all normal, no Lyme, but an unusually high ANA, which tests protein, specifically antinuclear antibodies, in your blood. The doctor suspected an autoimmune disease, lupus to be exact, and sent me to a rheumatologist. He was also a good doctor, taught and did research, and he listened. He did some more blood, lungs, heart testing and diagnosed me with a "very rare autoimmune disease" called Mixed Connective Tissue disease. Made sense. Except I didn't have all the symptoms. In fact I only had a couple. He said I'd develop more symptoms in the next 10 years. What?! Something inside me said: "That's not what you have."

I also had had knee problems in the summer of 2006. A swollen sore knee. Doctors said it was my crooked kneecap. One wanted to remove it. Hobbled to another who said, "We have to clip the ligaments and that will do the trick." This one was a good doctor., so I had the operation. Didn't work. Had gel injected behind the kneecap along with a cortisone shot (the worst thing for Lyme). That didn't work either. Said I would need a knee replacement eventually. The swelling came and went.

Lower back ache. Went to the doctor. Recommended physical therapy. Went. Didn't work.

I came home and got on the computer. Thank God for the Internet. Lyme disease. It frequently came up when I put in my symptoms. I read more. And more. Blogs, Web sites. The light slowly went on as I saw myself described. Things I didn't even know were symptoms. Brain fog. No energy. Some joint pains. Swollen ankle. Heel pain. Sore neck. Weight gain. Ribs sore. Lower back pain. Ocular migraines (you get the sparklies without the pain). Calf leg cramps.

Did I have all that? Yes, some were infrequent symptoms I hadn't really even thought about until they were pointed out, and they had appeared slowly over time. I wasn't reading the signals. I didn't know the language of Lyme back then. I had ignored almost everything except the fatigue and the knee. In fact I push through most pain and discomfort without awareness. This new information made me finally stop and take stock.

My dear boyfriend bought me two books on Lyme and their information just about convinced me. I was sure I had Lyme. But where did I get it? When did I get it? I sent for my records from my doctor to see if I could track anything down. I never saw a tick and never had a rash that I could remember. Then I saw that in January 2003, I had gone to my doctor with a flu-like illness and a swollen knee.

Bingo! Those are classic Lyme symptoms. I had begun hiking in the Las Trampas hills right behind my home in Alamo where I lived at the time. And ticks like to cling to grasses and shrubs, so they can jump on any carbon dioxide-emitting creature that comes by. Who knows how many creatures carry Lyme. In California, Lyme is carried by the deer tick, Ixodes pacificus, the Western black legged tick that starts out the size of the period at the end of this sentence. As they mature they grow to about the size of a sesame seed. Deer, squirrels and rats and mice are carriers. They don't get Lyme symptoms. The rest of us do. Tick jumps on carrier, tick bites carrier, tick jumps off. If the carrier is a person, Lyme is transmitted. And new evidence says it only takes four hours of tick attachment for you to get Lyme. If you pull off that tick five hours later, you could have Lyme disease.

One San Francisco doctor's name kept coming up in the blogs and on some Lyme Web sites. I made an appointment and had to wait two months, until August 2008. I was nervous. Was it all in my head? I wasn't that sick. Told him what I thought and, without missing a beat, he agreed and suspected, from my descriptions, that I might have another tick-borne disease as well. I asked to be put on antibiotics right then. Sent my blood to a Lyme-sensitive lab in Palo Alto. Normal lab testing rarely catches Lyme, which is difficult to catch with a blood test anyway. One month later - yes, I had Lyme disease and Bartonella, one of the many co-infections common with Lyme. I was almost relieved. At least it had a name. I had no idea the severity of this disease. I was beginning the journey I am on now.

What they test isn't the Lyme bacteria in your blood, but the antibodies your system creates against it. As you are treated and your immune system gets stronger, you put out more antibodies. So if a test doesn't show Lyme right away, that doesn't mean you don't have it. It may just mean your immune system hasn't produced measurable antibodies. Doctors have to go on what patients describe for now. It's called clinical evidence. Eventually it shows up in the tests.

Met a lady from San Ramon the last time I went to my doctor. She had it - hers was manifested in stomach symptoms - as did her college age daughter, who had two co-infections as well. Hers was nuero-borrealis - she couldn't retain anything she was learning. San Ramon! Alamo! It's right here. In fact my doctor currently treats hundreds - that's HUNDREDS - of Lyme patents, most from here in the Bay Area.

Every parent should be aware of ticks and Lyme; 25 percent of Lyme patients are kids. If you live where deer and squirrels live, then you can get Lyme. Kids should be checked after playing outside. One author described her two sons' bouts with Lyme, both now cured. One was ill for seven years. Couldn't even go to school. They thought he had all kinds of diseases - childhood arthritis, mental problems, eye problems, flu. We need to know! If I got it, you can get it.

Centers for Disease Control says one has to have a bulls eye rash, but more than 50 percent of Lyme patients never see one. This disease is the No. 1 vector-borne disease in the U.S.; we have five times the number of Lyme sufferers as AIDS patients. Why don't we know about it? And why didn't my doctors know about it?

CDC's official line on Lyme long has been controlled by a group of doctors, Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). They have a narrow definition of Lyme - just rashes and joint problems - completely ignoring the brain symptoms, the stomach problems, the rest of the Lyme symptoms that masquerade as other diseases. Lyme is a very difficult disease to diagnose, but if I could diagnose myself off the Internet, then why isn't my doctor getting the information he needs? Doctors now doing research are too few and far between, and are mostly doing it without financial help. I've found that these doctors had Lyme at one time and that's how they became interested.

One M.D. was diagnosed with advanced multiple sclerosis. He read about Lyme, went to a Lyme-literate doctor and is now cured and doing research. Lyme mimics a lot of diseases - multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Lou Gherig's disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, lupus - my doctor said I would be surprised at the number of cases of "lupus" he has cured. There was even a test of cadaver brains from the Alzheimer's Association and seven out of 10 had the Lyme bacteria. Mine masqueraded as an autoimmune disease.

How many other "diseases" are Lyme? Without informed doctors and better tests we will never know. This is a huge problem that keeps thousands of Americans ill and out of work. Insurance companies won't pay for Lyme, but go along with doctors who deny that chronic Lyme exists. Lyme disease doesn't go away. It grows and debilitates. And it can kill. I was lucky to find mine after only five years. Most patients go seven years and to scores of doctors before they are diagnosed - if they are diagnosed at all. Lyme caught right away takes only about two months of antibiotics to cure. But most Lyme is misdiagnosed. So chronic Lyme can take years to treat. Why don't the insurance companies realize this?

Because Lyme is a bacteria, albeit a virulent one, antibiotics work against it. You start treatment, you get worse, you get better, you get worse - the bacteria's cycle seems to be every four weeks. It's a nasty bug. Some people, not knowing, start the antibiotics and get really sick within a few days - it's called the Herxheimer effect - so they stop their antibiotics. Big mistake. Because Lyme is intracellular and extracellular, it is often treated with two different antibiotics. Some people who don't have a good immune system are critically ill right away. They may require intravenous antibiotics and medical support. And if you have a co-infection, it has to be killed before the Lyme can be treated effectively.

If I got another tick bite, I would find myself a doctor who would treat me immediately, THAT DAY. I fully intend to be cured. After I started treatment, I was fairly sick for a time but just recently I have had the best three weeks in several years. This reminded me how I can feel again. I was lucky to find a doctor who is a member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). These wonderful, true scientists are a growing group of Lyme-literate doctors who keep in touch with each other to combine their acquired knowledge gained through experience to recommend treatment for Lyme.

I know way more than I ever wanted to about Lyme and this is just the short version. I have been researching and reading and learning. I know this: If we don't start paying attention to this disease, it can become an epidemic - or has it already?

Sue Savod is now living in Diablo and taking her antibiotics. She is focusing on her career in animal portraits while regaining her health. Contact her at susavod@comcast.net.

Find this article at:
http://www.DanvilleWeekly.com/story.php?story_id=6347

Get free traffic to your website while surfing,find out how!

2009-07-15T15:10:00.001-06:00

RE: Free Website Traffic Just For Surfing The Web?

Hi Friends,

If you are looking for a great way to get some
free traffic to your website, well look no further.

Instant Buzz allows you to drive free targeted
traffic to your website just by doing what you do
anyway; surfing the web. Visit below:

http://www.InstantBuzz.com/r/?rbowman838
Within minutes, this breakthrough patent pending
technology will be sending quality visitors to your
site just because you installed the software onto
your computer.

That's right. You can install Instant Buzz in
seconds, never do anything different ever again,
and you'll still earn traffic every time you surf.

Visit the site below to get started now:
http://www.InstantBuzz.com/r/?rbowman838
Thanks,

Richard

The newest way to m ake money in the wireless industry!!

2009-07-13T14:54:00.001-06:00

Dear Friends,

When you have a moment, please visit my website
http://rbowman838.mywirelessrep.com/p1567897m824.html

This company is located in an 80,000 square foot office campus
and has been in business since 1993. They just partnered with one
of the largest wireless providers to become the first wholesale
provider of their product nationwide.

84% of the U.S. has a wireless phone and no one gets paid to use
it. I will give you a call soon. If you would like more
information, please visit my website, email me, or call me. My
information is below. I am looking forward to speaking with you
soon.

Sincerely,
Rich Bowman
719-240-9955

rbowman838@aol.com

SpinSuccess.com

2009-05-31T14:30:00.002-06:00

Need More PAID Sign-Ups?

Use SpinSuccess to get heaps of paid sign-ups each & every day!

==> Click Here Now <==

Capital24Online - Check this one out!

2009-05-22T17:11:00.001-06:00

What We don't know about Lyme.

2009-05-21T06:22:00.003-06:00

Hello again,

This is a great article from Pamela Weintraub. It is quite long, but well worth taking the time to read. There is a lot of great information. This last week, I had a couple of appointments with my regular doctors and I was again disheartened at their lack of knowledge of Lyme disease. It was as though they didn't care that I was still suffering from Lyme disease, but that because they didn't know anything about it, it excused them from trying to treat me. They would address my diabetes(brought on by the Lyme disease)but that was all they could do for me. They made the comment that they would let whoever is working with me on Lyme, if anyone, treat me for that. It was infuriating and I resolved again to work harder on being a Lyme disease activist. The work that Pamela Weintraub has done for Lyme disease patients is second to none. For those of you who haven't read any of her books, I encourage to do so.

More resolved than ever,
Richard

What We Don't Know About Lyme

When a mysterious and debilitating illness overtook her and her family, the author struggled to find some answers. What she discovered about Lyme disease - and how little is actually known or agreed upon by the medical experts - is something everyone who goes outdoors should learn.
What We Don't Know About Lyme

By Pamela Weintraub

Features,
June 2009

Lume 101
Slipping Through the Cracks
Lyme on the Brain
The Treatment Controversy
Tick Menagerie
A New Lyme Science
Last Dance With Lyme
How to Protect Yourself Against Lyme Disease
Finding a Provider
Web Resources

After we moved from the city to a wooded property in the suburban hamlet of Chappaqua, N.Y., in 1993, our family began to get sick. At first, the vague headaches, joint pains and bone weariness were so subtle they barely merited note. But as years passed, these symptoms intensified into frank signs of disease.

My arms and legs buzzed so palpably I felt like I was wired to a power grid. A relentless migraine became so intense I spent hours each day in a darkened room, in bed. My husband, Mark, an avid tennis player, began stumbling and bumping into walls. He was an award-winning journalist, but slowly he began struggling with memory and groping for words. Our youngest son, David, began to sleep — first, so long that he could not do his homework or see his friends; eventually, so much (15 or more hours a day) that he could not get to class.

Hardest hit was Jason, our oldest, who suffered fatigue and shooting pains starting at age 9, the year we moved to our little house in the woods. The doctors called these “growing pains” normal, but by February 2000, Jason, then 16, was essentially disabled. An honor student, he now had trouble reading even simple paragraphs. His joints and muscles hurt so much it was difficult for him to walk. And he couldn’t tolerate sound and light. On medical leave from high school, he spent his days in the tub in our darkened main-floor bathroom as hot water and steam eased his pain.

As his condition worsened, and as all sorts of lab tests came back negative, a raft of specialists at New York City’s top teaching hospitals suggested diagnoses ranging from migraine aura (migraine without the pain) to Fifth’s disease (caused by parvovirus). Each diagnosis elicited a treatment, but none of them worked.

“What about Lyme disease?” I asked from time to time, since we lived in an area where the infection was endemic; our backyard was a haven for deer, and Jason spent summers playing in a fort in the woods behind our house.

“There are too many symptoms here, and he’s way too sick for Lyme disease,” replied the pediatrician, who declined to even test for it. But with answers still eluding us, the pediatrician finally drew blood for a Western blot, a diagnostic test that matched antibodies produced by the patient against the proteins of the invading organism — in this case the bacterium known to cause Lyme.

When the labs came back, Jason had so many “bands” — with each band considered an antibody-protein match — that the result was off-the-charts positive. By the summer of that year, the rest of us had been diagnosed as well.

The news was a relief. With a solid diagnosis, we were told by doctors, we could get treated for this easily curable infection, and move on. We felt a flush of optimism, but it turned out that our struggle had just begun. I would spend the next nine years trying to make sense of our misdiagnoses and seeking effective treatment for my children.

Lyme 101 (Back to Top)
What I didn’t know about Lyme disease back then could have filled a book — one that, as a longtime science and medical journalist, I eventually wrote. My book, Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), explores the complex science and disturbing political war over the illness. But a few facts can be served up straight: Lyme disease is caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, a spiral-shaped bacterium, and is generally transmitted to people through the bite of a deer tick.

The disease arrived in the Northeast United States, northwest California and the Great Lakes region in force in the 1970s, as the continent was being reforested and new suburban housing was increasingly built adjacent to woods. The spirochete lived in the blood of rodents and other small mammals inhabiting those woods. When ticks bit these mammals they became infected. When those same ticks bit human hosts, they transmitted Lyme disease to them.

Pushing the disease to epidemic proportions, however, required something else: large mammals, like deer, are each able to provide nourishment for hundreds of large adult ticks, enabling them to reproduce en masse. As the deer population exploded across the forested regions of the country, the Lyme epidemic followed suit. Ultimately, infected ticks traversed the continental flyways on the backs of migrating birds, bringing Lyme to every state. Today, 12 to 40 percent of deer ticks are infected in the most endemic areas of the Northeast, and between 3 and 40 percent in endemic areas of the West Coast. With more than 200,000 CDC-acknowledged cases a year in the United States (the tip of the iceberg, many believe), Lyme has become one of country’s fastest-spreading diseases.

Slipping Through the Cracks (Back to Top)
When diagnosed with a Lyme rash and treated early, most infected patients are easily cured. But this upbeat message has little meaning for those diagnosed late. Show up at the doctor without a rash, and diagnosing Lyme disease becomes an elaborate, labyrinthine affair.

The standard guidelines, published by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), call for early diagnosis exclusively through the presence of that telltale rash — mistakenly thought of by many practitioners as a classic “bull’s-eye” shape. Yet the spreading red rash with areas of white clearing, called an erythema migrans, might not be round or oval — let alone a bull’s eye. (Jason’s rash, which I later recognized in a medical textbook, was dismissed by our medical group because it covered his torso in a swath.) According to some studies and estimates, fewer than 60 percent of Lyme patients ever exhibit or notice a rash of any sort.

Those without this early sign may roam the diagnostic desert for years seeking answers. Yet, IDSA guidelines require that, to qualify for diagnosis, patients without the rash must present with one of a small group of quantifiable disease signs, from measurable nerve damage to grossly swollen knees. Though many experts say a significant percentage of Lyme patients experience only “symptoms” — headache, memory loss or fatigue — IDSA calls these problems just too vague to consider a diagnosis of Lyme. But, even with objective signs like swollen knees, patients must pass a series of tests before a diagnosis can be made.

And that’s the other part of the problem. Should the patient present those frank signs of disease and qualify for the test, the bar for passing is set perilously high for some. According to the peer-reviewed journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, “The tests are prone to false-negative and false-positive results and can be misleading, especially early in the course of the disease. . . . Because serologic [blood] testing is not 100 percent sensitive or specific, some people with Lyme disease will not have confirmatory laboratory results.”

The most comprehensive review of the standard Lyme tests comes from Johns Hopkins University. Working with patients from Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Hopkins scientists studied state-of-the-art serology and DNA tests for Lyme and found serious flaws: Most tellingly, when the standard two-step method recommended by the CDC was used on patients with other laboratory evidence of Lyme disease, it was positive between 45 percent and 77 percent of the time. As for DNA tests, the Hopkins researchers reported these rarely pick up otherwise-confirmed Lyme disease at all.

It is made all the more complicated because there are hundreds of strains of the Lyme disease spirochete throughout the world, says Benjamin Luft, MD, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Each strain has its own combination of proteins, evoking a variety of bands on diagnostic tests; some will match the pattern the CDC has approved for a positive on the Western blot (the second of two tests in the series), but others may not. Each Lyme strain evokes a unique antibody pattern and its own flavor of disease.

In short, Mayo Clinic researchers note, diagnosis should be clinical — based not on the tests but on the patient and the patient’s situation as a whole. With so many strains of Lyme disease and a unique immune system for each new patient, this only makes sense. Yet with Lyme disease so controversial, most primary-care doctors end up deferring to the tests, leaving those who fail them out in the cold.

“I’ve been scraping Lyme patients off the sidewalk for years,” says Kenneth Liegner, MD, who practices in Armonk, N.Y., not far from where my family got sick. “By the time some of these people get to me, they are so disabled they can barely think or walk.”

Lyme on the Brain (Back to Top)
Given the barriers to diagnosis, many patients slide ever deeper into illness, where disability can be profound. Lyme invades not just our skin and our joints, but our hearts, nervous systems and eyes. Lyme is commonly considered a knee disease, an impediment in tennis, but the Lyme spirochete, like the syphilis spirochete, also invades the brain.

Testing hundreds of such patients, New York University neuropsychologist Leo J. Shea III, PhD, found specific deficits in concentration, short-term memory and processing speed. Patients can be so impaired they have trouble driving around their neighborhoods and can no longer perform their jobs.

Psychiatrist Brian Fallon, MD, director of the Lyme and Tick Borne Diseases Research Center at Columbia University Medical Center, found that brain infection could trigger a host of psychiatric problems, ranging from bipolar disorder and depression to panic and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Time and again, Fallon has seen Lyme disease “misdiagnosed as a primary psychiatric problem,” while the root issue — infection with the spirochete B. burgdorferi — was never addressed. This is especially damaging, he says, since a delay in treatment could turn an acute and easily curable infection into a chronic disease highly resistant to treatment.

The Treatment Controversy (Back to Top)
Patients diagnosed in the earliest stage of the disease through a classic rash can usually look forward to full recovery after a monthlong regimen of the oral antibiotics doxycycline or amoxicillin. Those with neurological or arthritic symptoms may be offered intravenous ceftriaxone for a month or two. But experts like Luft and Liegner have found that some 20 percent of those infected for over a year before the start of treatment will fail these protocols and stay sick.

Without further options from the IDSA team, these late-diagnosed patients have sought help from controversial doctors known as Lyme-Literate MDs (LLMDs), who argue that longer courses, higher doses and multidrug antibiotic regimens provide a viable option for many of the “incurable” 20 percent. As ever more patients flock to LLMDs like Liegner, the controversy has mounted, with IDSA pitted against another, newer group: the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). IDSA says the short-term treatment always stamps out infection and argues that overexposure to antibiotics can generate treatment-resistant bugs. Competing guidelines from ILADS hold that patients already have a hard-to-treat infection (chronic, persistent Lyme disease) and that more aggressive treatment is thus warranted.

The debate has recently come closer to resolution with surprising research from veterinary scientist Stephen Barthold, DVM, PhD, who spent 25 years investigating Lyme disease at Yale before setting up shop as director of the Center for Comparative Medicine at the University of California at Davis. Barthold reports that if he allows the infection to remain untreated for months across a range of mammal species in the lab, he can always recover living spirochetes, generally sequestered in tissues that are rich in collagen. When laboratory mice infected with these spirochetes are treated with what should be effective doses of various antibiotics, the spirochetes cannot be cultured from tissues by conventional means, but they are alive and can be transmitted by ticks to other mice.

The finding resonates with what late-diagnosed patients report: If surviving spirochetes are so sluggish they cannot replicate, they may be impervious to antibiotics that work by targeting bacterial cells as they divide. The persisting spirochetes could be the presumptive source of the constitutional symptoms like pain and fatigue that often follow treatment; they may be provoking the production of symptom-causing cytokines (immune molecules), yet still be too low in number to cause the gross inflammation or provoke the antibody response that many mainstream experts call the sine qua non of the disease. Infection might be suppressed but not eradicated by treatment, as so many relapsing patients report.

Spurred by the findings, university-based researchers are attacking the infection on several fronts. Scientists like Luft and Barthold are actively testing antibiotics designed to purge these dormant, resistant spirochetes. Some researchers are trying to destroy them with nanotechnology and heat. And a California company called Viral Genetics, with research headed by M. Karen Newell, PhD, and aided by Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, discoverer of the HIV virus, is trying to modulate the immune system so it can clean out infection on its own. Still others suggest that the low-level infection might be benign if the immune response could be contained.

Tick Menagerie (Back to Top)
Improved treatments for Lyme disease alone may not solve the problem. There are other infections inhabiting the ticks that spread Lyme, and they are factors as well. The malaria-like parasite Babesia infects our red blood cells and results in fever, exhaustion and drenching sweats. Babesiosis combined with Lyme disease can be especially protracted and difficult to treat. Tick-borne bacteria like Anaplasma and Ehrlichia, which live in human cells, are rife throughout regions where Lyme has reared its head. These organisms don’t necessarily respond to all common treatment for Lyme disease and may cause serious illness even when Lyme is not involved.

Added to this are other microbes as well; though still controversial, these, too, are now considered possible agents of the disease complex broadly referred to as “Lyme.” One of the most notable is the rod-shaped bacterium Bartonella henselae, known as a cause of “cat scratch” disease and commonly transmitted by cats. More recently, forms of bartonella have been discovered in abundance in deer ticks. Some doctors cite Bartonella as a culprit when symptoms are particularly neuropsychiatric, and when treatment for Lyme does not work.

Another tick-borne suspect, Mycoplasma, has been discovered in deer ticks in Connecticut and New Jersey. “This could be the missing link,” says Eva Sapi, PhD, associate professor of biology at the University of New Haven, who also hypothesizes that nematodes play a role in tick-borne disease. It would explain why some patients don’t get well when treated for Lyme disease alone. Other researchers have found Tularemia, often an agent of bio-terrorism, in Lyme ticks.

A host of other spirochetes, some not yet identified, complete the scene. Yale researchers found that 20 percent of the spirochetes thought to be Borrelia burgdorferi in the Northeast are really another species, a relapsing fever spirochete never seen in North America before. There’s a still-unidentified spirochete in Montana, this time transmitted by the wood tick. And then there’s the lonestar tick, which has recently spread from the South throughout the Midwest and up the East Coast, as far north as Maine. The lonestar carries an unidentified spirochete, the cause of a Lymelike disease that the CDC has recently recognized.

“We are just starting to understand the full range of infections that we might get,” says David H. Persing, MD, PhD, chief medical and technology officer for Cepheid, a California biotech firm and a world expert in molecular diagnostics. “I don’t think we know half of the agents that are potentially transmissible by ticks.”

Add to this the morphing quality of the various microbes implicated in these Lymelike diseases. Through constant shifting of plasmid DNA among the microbes, ticks facilitate a rapid form of evolution and drive the creation of novel strains and microbes, virtually nonstop. Indeed, in the universe of emerging infectious disease, the tick is the final frontier. The ultimate germ generator, it is the ideal wet lab for microorganisms to mix and remix in infinite formats, spewing a kaleidoscopic oeuvre of novel bacteria and viruses, some of them pathogens the world has never seen.

A New Lyme Science (Back to Top)
I wish I had understood Lyme as an emerging infectious disease and political hot potato when my family first got sick. Exposed to the noxious debate, the naive patient sees two polarized factions and feels pressured to choose one. But interview the workbench researchers and you will find a complex, nuanced reality emerging from the science itself. Sadly, the vicious political fight over Lyme disease has dumbed down the dialogue and prevented the best science from being heard.

In 2009, the pace of scientific progress is great. Instead of testing for a mere 10 antibodies to a limited number of spirochetal proteins — the procedure still being used in most of today’s commercial labs — new diagnostics that Luft and his Stony Brook colleagues have developed will use proteomics (study of proteins) to tap 1,800 B. burgdorferi proteins found across the range of strains. “We want to test against the entire array of borrelia proteins in all their variability,” says Luft. “So if I look at a patient over time, over the course of their disease I can see whether new proteins, ones we’ve never noticed, might emerge.”

The work on strains could alter how we diagnose and treat the disease in the years to come, says Alan Barbour, director of the Pacific-Southwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of California Irvine and one of the world’s foremost spirochete experts. “If some strains are more likely than others to spread in the blood, and by that route to other tissues, then identification of the strain a person is infected with could help guide therapy,” Barbour explains. “Some strains may call for a longer course of antibiotics. The problem is isolating the microbe out of the patient to see what strain it is. This could be done by a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test of the blood or a skin biopsy, when there is a rash. Isolating the microbe is harder when the illness has been going on for longer than a few weeks, but any isolate of Borrelia burgdorferi from a patient would mean a diagnosis of Lyme disease.”

Also shedding light on treatment is genomics (the study of genes). The Luft team has recently found that Lyme spirochetes have genes for pumping out the first-line antibiotic doxycycline. This means that even as doxycycline enters the Lyme bacterium, it is being ejected, much like a sump pump might eject water from a basement floor. As a result, the dose might not climb high enough to kill the infection, and the patient won’t get well.

Based on this finding, Luft is now studying another drug — tigecycline, an intravenous antibiotic currently used for infections of the abdominal organs and skin. Its mechanism is much like that of doxycycline — except that its chemical structure inhibits the spirochetes’ “pump,” keeping the antibiotic from being ejected by the cells. “It’s a hundred times more active against the spirochete than doxycycline. Instead of just inhibiting the spirochetes, like doxy, it kills them dead,” says Luft.

“We’re at a critical point,” he adds. “We have powerful new tools and a fundamental understanding of the biology of the Borrelia. We know every gene in that organism. We know all the variations of those genes. We know what’s in the human genome. So, when someone gets sick, we’ve got to put this together, in context, and ask what’s going on.”

Indeed, work like this will explain why prognosis varies so widely from one patient to the next. With so many strains, so many co-infections and so many immune systems, Lyme — in the broad sense of the word — will never be one-size-fits-all.

“Some researchers have thrown down their gloves and retreated to their corners, leaving patients out in the cold,” says Luft. “But despite what they say, the patients are still sick. It’s a question of doing right by them — it’s not a question of whether you might have to eat crow. We’ve got to go in and do the right experiments, and then we can look truth in the eye.”

Last Dance With Lyme (Back to Top)
My family has come a long way since our Lyme diagnoses almost a decade ago. We’ve left the Lymelands for safer ground — the concrete expanse of Brooklyn. I’ve been off antibiotics since 2004 and am back at a full-time job. Mark continues to relapse when he stops his antibiotic, but with it, he works his day job, plays tennis and seems fine. Jason has recovered. He graduated from Brown University in spring 2008 and leaves for film school in the fall.

But Lyme still clouds our lives because our younger son, David, was re-infected in Westchester County a couple of years back and remains ill.

In all my years of research, I never doubted that IDSA was right about early Lyme: Treat the rash and a cure would be guaranteed. So in the summer of 2007, when David called to tell me that friends in his college dorm had recognized a classic bull’s-eye rash on his arm, I was actually relieved: For once, we’d caught it early. A month of antibiotics, I told myself, and David would be cured.

We took a 40-minute drive to Dr. Daniel Cameron’s office in downtown Mount Kisco, N.Y., and his physician assistant easily diagnosed a bull’s-eye-shaped erythema migrans that was an archetype of the form. She prescribed a few weeks of amoxicillin and sent us home.

“When you get a rash so classic that everyone at college tells you it’s Lyme disease, it’s a beautiful thing,” Dan Cameron, now president of ILADS, said at the time.

But by spring 2008, David’s fatigue was so profound, his memory and focus so poor, that he had to drop his classes at Vassar College and come home. Back in New York, doctors discovered gross damage to David’s cranial nerves — irrefutable, IDSA-style proof of inflammatory disease and hardcore evidence of Lyme. Ordering more tests, Cameron found not just Lyme disease but a co-infection — babesiosis — known to complicate the picture and make Lyme harder to treat.

I completed work on my book about this mysterious disease more than a year ago, but I know now that our journey is far from over. Our family, along with many others, continues to deal with the fallout at the frontlines of an epidemic, in that unforgiving land called Lyme.

Pamela Weintraub is a senior editor at Discover Magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). She writes a blog on emerging disease for Psychology Today.

How to Protect Yourself Against Lyme Disease (Back to Top)
For those who live and work in Lyme endemic areas, a little protection goes a long way. You can enjoy nature, according to Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, as long as you take some precautions:

* Walk in the middle of trails. Avoid sitting on logs or leaning on trees.
* Wear a hat. Tuck your hair in, if possible.

* Wear a long-sleeved shirt, fitted at the waist.
* Wear boots or shoes, not sandals. No bare feet.
* Wear long pants tucked into high socks, or duct tape around pant bottoms.
* Consider applying Deet for skin and permethrin for clothes (use your own best judgment in weighing exposure to these toxins against risk of tick bites).
* Wear white or light-colored clothing so ticks stand out.
* Check yourself and your children for ticks immediately after outdoor exposure. Repeat the tick check again, three days later. Remember that nymphal (adolescent) ticks can look like freckles. They are the size of poppy seeds.
* If you find an attached tick, remove it carefully with tweezers placed as close to the skin as possible. Pull the tick upward with steady, even pressure, making sure that mouth parts are cleanly removed. Apply antiseptic and call a doctor. Save the tick in a sealed container with a moist cotton ball. Call your state health department to inquire about testing. (Ticks do fall off on their own eventually, so even if you don’t see a tick, it is possible that you may have been exposed to disease.)
* Consult your doctor about treating the tick bite with oral antibiotics. Though the number of days required for this treatment remains controversial, new findings from CDC research suggest that the single dose of treatment generally recommended for this scenario may be inadequate and that a doxycycline sustained release protocol (19 days) the CDC is developing might be more effective.

Finding a Provider (Back to Top)
How to find a doctor to treat your tick-borne disease.

Lyme disease is never pleasant, but if you are exposed in endemic areas of the Northeast, the Midwest or the West Coast and develop the spreading red Lyme rash known as erythema migrans, the best person to consult is your family doctor. The classic Lyme disease rash is considered diagnostic for the disease in these areas, according to the standard guidelines from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). Physicians following these widely accepted guidelines will not even have to order a blood test to make a bulletproof diagnosis. For most people without other complications, including other infections from the same tick bite, a month of treatment with oral antibiotics like doxycycline or amoxicillin should cure the disease.

Finding a doctor able to make the diagnosis and treat you adequately becomes far more challenging if you do not see or develop a rash, or if you live outside areas considered most endemic for the disease. Given the debate in the medical community over the classic signs and symptoms for Lyme, the inaccuracy of the tests, and the presence of complicating co-infections, patients in this circumstance can advance into later, harder-to-treat disease before they are ever diagnosed.

In this instance, it may be appropriate to consult a neurologist, rheumatologist or infectious disease doctor in your community for specialized but mainstream care. Following the IDSA guidelines, these physicians will treat these sicker patients with specialized antimicrobials aimed at co-infections, or with a month or two of intravenous Rocephin, which crosses the blood brain barrier and better penetrates the joints, often resolving Lyme disease.

But about 20 percent of patients diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease report that they fail even this more aggressive treatment; others report that their co-infections are missed. Still sick, they find themselves navigating the tortuous backroads of the Lyme wars. Those seeking clinical evaluation of the range of tick-borne infections or continued treatment for Lyme disease itself — as I did with my own family — may decide to cross the line, leaving the restrictions of the mainstream viewpoint for the alternative world of Lyme doctors, referred to by patients as Lyme-Literate Medical Doctors, or LLMDs. These physicians will test patients for a range of co-infections and treat Lyme disease longer, using antibiotics in combination (as is done with tuberculosis cases) for months and sometimes years.

Many patients report recovery on such protocols — but many do not, and for them, the search for treatment goes on. Some patients consult trained naturopaths, who help them boost their immune systems. One new trend used by neurologists at New York University and Yale involves treatment with IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin), a blood product rich in immune molecules that can heal damaged nerves.

For reference to a doctor skilled in mainstream protocols, contact the Infectious Diseases Society of America. For reference to a doctor willing to treat tick-borne infection beyond the standard guidelines, contact the Lyme Disease Association or the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. (See Web Resources, below.)

Web Resources (Back to Top)

* Infectious Diseases Society of America: www.idsociety.org
* Lyme Disease Association: www.lymediseaseassociation.org
* International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society: www.ilads.or

Enjoy the books you discover in each issue of Experience Life.
Amazon.com
LifeTime Fitness

Advertiser Services |Privacy Policy |Terms of Service |Contact Us

©2007 LIFE TIME FITNESS, Inc. All rights reserved. Life Time Fitness corporate headquarters: 2902 Corporate Place, Chanhassen, MN 55317 | Ph:952-947-0000

June 2009: Get Into Nature Subscribe

June 2009
Browse Contents
http://experiencelifemag.com/healthy-learning-resources/blue-zones.html
Behind the Scenes With Alexandra Coustea

Http://rbowman838.pushbuttonextreme.com

2009-05-19T20:30:00.001-06:00

Bowman's Thoughts and Things

Host Gator Web Hosting

Happy New Year!

A Cure to Late for many

Lyme Disease Natural Remedy Report

Nature's Dirty Needle

Hi Everyone,

This is a great article I ran across from our friends at Lymedisease.org.

TOUCHED BY LYME: (book review) Nature's Dirty Needle

Phone Detective-

Ticks Aren't the Only Parasites

Brooke Landau- A Battle with Lyme

Researchers Say Local Antibiotic Therapy Stops Lyme Disease

How About some Diversion?

Lyme Disease Inspires Woman to Help

Hi My friends,

Be well,

Richard

Firsthand, family experience with Lyme disease inspires woman to help others suffering from tick-borne illnesses

New Blood Test Available- Great News

New Borrelia Culture Test - Faster & More Accurate

Fix Your PC Online

Antibodies linked to long-term Lyme symptoms

Inflammatory role

References

Lyme Disease in Illinois

A Deadly New Reason to Avoid Deer Ticks - Healthy Living Center - Everyday Health

A Deadly New Reason to Avoid Deer Ticks

A little-known illness they're spreading can be fatal, especially to people with a weak immune system.

American Red Cross and the Blood Supply

Great Article a must read!

Office Supplies, janitorial supplies, office furniture and more at Kmart.com

Loss, Pain, and Frustration

Over the Edge

Lyme Disease

NASCAR.COM TrackPass - Live in-car audio, race stats and virtual video for NASCAR races with RaceView, PitCommand and Scanner.

Lyme disease cookbook

Unlimited Movie Downloads- Legal!

Dr. Jernigan's Blog Article

Misdiagnosis- A Common Problem

Hi my friends,

Fisher: After long struggle with Lyme disease, Bart's going home

Living with Lyme Disease

Bloggers Guide to Profits

Yet another Lyme disease victim !

Mysterious Lyme Disease

Yet another familiar story

ISDA has again showed extreme ignorance!

New Tick Carrying Disease!

Health Care- The truth for a change!

Dr. Dave Martz - A Lyme Disease Champion

Checkout a great source of information!

Flawed Lyme disease Guidelines

Try Giblink Now

Efforts to educate the Public about Lyme disease

More Lyme disease controversy

Lyme Disease Controversy Comes to the Capitol

A Common Lyme Disease Story.

Chronic Lyme disease hobbles Spanish Fork woman

Check out my new Website!

PersonalPowerline.com

Lyme and the use of Steroids

"Under the Eightball"

Need More Website Traffic

Under Our Skin .. a possible Oscar!

A personal note to all who suffer from Lyme disease!

Hits4Pay.com

Living with Lyme: Bacterium can 'cloak' itself - The Willits News

KSTP TV - Minneapolis and St. Paul - Bill Would Protect Doctors Treating Lyme Disease

Living with Lyme: Long, often debilitating treatment flouts IDSA 'guidelines' - The Willits News

Reverse Phone Lookup

New smaller and lighter Sony Playstation 3 !

New book concerning Chronic Lyme Disease Treatment

How to Choose the Dog That's a Perfect Fit for You.

This one is fantastic. Get Affiliate Jump now!

Try Lightyear Wireless

Check out Fotolia.com

New tick disease moves into La Crosse area (WI)

VirualURL- Great Product!

Freebie Force- Take a look