Lyme Disease Controversy

      Living in the woods of Maine, I have always been warned about deer ticks giving people Lyme disease. I was always afraid to have a tick on me because I knew since it was a disease it wouldn't be good. I never had a full understanding what Lyme disease actually was though. I had never known anyone who had it and nobody seemed to talk about what happened to people who had it unlike other diseases like meningitis, malaria, or tuberculosis. Unfortunately I learned the hard way just how bad Lyme disease can be.
      Six years ago I was working with my dad over the summer. We would sometimes be near the woods and one day my dad found a tick on him. He didn't think anything of it and took it off. He never got the red bulls-eye ring around the spot he found it so he thought everything would be fine. We were doing a lot of manual labor. Throughout the year he started to feel aches in his joints which made it harder and harder to work.  He thought it was just due to  injuries. It kept getting worse and people were telling him that he might have arthritis so he started doing all of the remedies for arthritis. Nothing worked.

Normal knee vs. knee with Lyme disease

      For the next few years he progressively got worse. His joints started to swell and became stiff. The worst was his knees and wrists. His knees swelled up to the size of softballs. If anything touched them he would get shooting pains. It got to the point where he couldn't walk on his own and had a very hard time picking things up or grabbing them if it strained his wrists. He couldn't move his wrists or knees without extreme pain. He lost all of his muscle mass which made it even harder to do things. By last year he had to be in a wheel chair if we were to go some place that required more than a few steps.
      My dad had figured out it was Lyme disease through research but there was nothing he could do all of those years because doctors do not treat Lyme disease very effectively. Instead, he took matters into his own hands. He researched the most effective way to treat Lyme disease which is by antibiotics. The only problem is, the amount of antibiotics it takes to cure Lyme disease can not be prescribed by your doctor because they are not allowed to legally give out that amount in fear of humans developing an immunity to antibiotics.That is one reason why most people with Lyme disease go untreated. Another reason is because Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose. The easiest way to diagnose it is by the red bulls-eye rash after you find the tick but like in my dad's case sometimes people don't have it. The only way blood-testing helps is in later stages if there antibodies being produced to attack the bacteria and can be used as evidence from exposure to the bacteria. Although antibodies are not a very accurate diagnosis for diseases. Not being able to accurately diagnose Lyme disease is another reason so many people suffer from it untreated.