chat

The same medical establishment that only recently admitted that chronic fatigue syndrome was real and not something women were making up for attention? The same medical establishment that ignores and gaslights those of us with "invisible illnesses"? (I've been told my disablity isn't real by a doctor before and so have many others!) The same medical establishment that treats different races differently due to racist nonsense thats still taught in med school? The same medical establishment that does conversion therapy (torture) on autistic children?

Good thing they've never been wrong or caught lying before.

TRUE

Lyme disease is a real thing but usually (especially in "left" context) when someone says "lyme" there is a 90% chance that is NOT what they are talking about. It's a conspiracy theory promoted by anti-science grifters to entice people to travel to spend weeks or months at retreats getting long term antibiotics infusions or whatever else.

The suffering on the ground is real but total misdirection. It's kind of like the satanic panic or something.

I posted recent recent clinical practice guidelines, this stuff is addressed in there. They know its fake.

AFAIK lyme disease has a pretty good prognosis assuming you have access to health care. And if you don't that is a different thing and whether "they" do know how to treat it or not, doesn't matter much to you .

I guess I will be the sole person to point out that "chronic Lyme" is viewed by the medical establishment as a pseudoscientific diagnosis.

The idea that disease infections can cause permanent organ damage and ongoing health problems even after the disease itself is gone is, bafflingly, something that's only started being accepted since covid started doing that on a big enough scale that researchers a) had no choice but to acknowledge it, and b) started getting a little funding to go and look to see if other diseases also did that sort of thing as well (they do, it's just covid is particularly bad about it and also extremely contagious).

To add a bit more context: Its not as simple as "chronic lyme is fake", because literally like 10% of lyme disease cases will have lingering symptoms after treatment. To distinguish it from quacks who say anyone with vaguely similar symptoms must have chronic lyme (even if there's no evidence they had a lyme disease infection in the first place), scientists refer to it as PTLDS (Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome).

If the person actually had lyme disease to begin with, it may well be PTLDS symptoms, and may well be helped by a second course of antibiotics. If they didn't actually confirm it was lyme though, or the lyme infection was years ago, it's way more questionable. Their symptoms probably aren't fake but they may well be getting taken advantage of by quack doctors, and making their health worse by continuing to take antibiotics for extended periods of time, etc.

Yeah "chronic Lyme" is not a real illness. Lyme disease is very much real obviously, but not chronic Lyme, which is usually used by quacks to sell snake oil, or as an excuse by celebrities to disappear from the limelight for a while.

i used to go outside to stack rocks but that's illegal now

Outdoor cats (that are not properly managed, like used as mousers in a barn) are walking ecological disasters.

Release tick eating animals and start killing more deer

they give it to pets. it's the same vaccine. the costs of getting through regulation for humans was too much and not worthwhile.

people who think vaccines are a money making plot needs to get get their heads screwed back on. so many vaccines held back because of being insufficiently profitable.

Thought I read they're in stage 3 of trials for a Lyme disease vaccine now. Idk, too lazy to look up the legitimacy.

Spongebob might mean chronic lyme, which IIRC is dismissed by most doctors without further investigation.

would this be unlikely for those who've never experienced any noticeable symptoms after a tick bite?

That's horrifying schizophrenia is worse than tinnitus you're gonna hear a demon man yelling insults at your door at 4am and knowing for sure it's fake won't make it stop

apparently some people all meat.

forced feminization but for veganism

I mean, the red meat thing is just one factor. It's a whole slew of other issues that come with the disease, but meat allergy is clickbaity. Arthro Pod did an episode on it, I believe.

fibromyalgia

iirc fibromyalgia isn't a specific thing either, just "lol chronic pain we can't figure out" but the insurance companies need a formal category to pay out

I just skimmed a Harvard Health article that broke it down to a failing of the economic system, which in turn led to a medical failing due to lack of research / lack of time to diagnose. The article ends by saying that the organization of affected people and local doctors could lead to increased care.

Harvard Health article

Not OP, but around here, getting bitten by ticks is very common. Almost everyone I knew who liked being outdoorsy had been bitten at least once, and usually had several tick-bite stories. If you don't do a thorough tick check after every hike or jaunt into weeds or woods, you're playing roulette and will get one before too long. I myself have had to pull ticks out of me probably around 10-15 times (mostly as a kid when I was less careful when out hiking).

edit to add: Even when you're careful, ticks can still be easy to miss and you can still get bitten. The little fuckers are notorious for how sneaky they can be. I didn't mean the above to imply that someone who gets bit is at fault for not being careful enough, because it still can happen sometimes even when you take precautions, it just becomes much less likely.

doesn't literally everyone who spends any time in a woodsy area gets them?? i got bitten like 6 times a year as a kid and got a couple last year