Learning about Lyme disease the hard way

Linda’s comment:  Excuse me but this is very common AND TRAGIC!!  I don’t know what it is going to take to get treatments for those suffering from Lyme.  I personally treated both Lyme infections with alternatives, BUT then again I live in a state that has many licensing boards so doctors don’t have to FEAR the authorities.  The AMA can’t touch the method of treatment that alternative doctor prescribe.  The tragic part of this is insurance companies will NOT pay for alternatives…unless of course, you live in Alaska and there many of the insurance companies are paying for alternative treatments and modalities….

A month ago, Bart Fenolio was told he had Lou Gehrig’s disease and had two months to live. Doctors advised his wife, Heidi, to take him home and call a hospice.

But Fenolio is proving the doctors wrong. Instead of getting worse, he’s growing stronger each day, thanks to antibiotics. That’s because he doesn’t have Lou Gehrig’s disease, which isn’t curable. He has Lyme disease, which is.

Lyme disease, a bacterial illness spread by ticks, is a poorly understood and strangely controversial illness that has been sweeping the country since it was discovered in Connecticut in the 1970s. While still rare in California, there were 28,921 confirmed cases and 6,277 probable cases in the United States in 2008, nearly twice as many as in 1994.

But Lyme experts suspect there could be 10 times that many. That’s because when not treated immediately, Lyme can hide in the body for years and then attack, masquerading as anything from heart disease to arthritis to lupus. Folks might not even know they’d been bitten. And the tests for Lyme disease are notoriously unreliable.