Lyme disease often misdiagnosed

Don’t let this legendary misdiagnosis happen to you!

You’ve been forgetting names, dates, and places… and misplacing your glasses, keys, and phone… and you’re afraid it’ll only get worse.

All your doc tells you is that you’re getting older. Those senior moments aren’t going away, he’ll say, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But what if I told you that those “brain burps” might not be a problem with your mind at all?

Because the REAL culprit may be a bacterial infection.

That’s what happened to one of the greatest songwriters and movie stars of our time, Kris Kristofferson.

For years, docs told The Highwayman that his memory loss was Alzheimer’s — or, at the very least, dementia caused by sports injuries from his youth.

And, as doctors do, they medicated him — and not just for AD. They also put him on pills for depression.

In the end, it turned out that he wasn’t depressed, and his symptoms weren’t a sign of dementia at all.

Everything he’d been experiencing was a result of a long-undiagnosed case of LYME DISEASE! And after a three-week course of antibiotics, he was back to his old self again.

Mainstream medicine thinks of Lyme as a relatively uncommon disease, but that’s because so many people have it and never know it. They get diagnosed instead with neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, ALS, and — like Kristofferson — dementia.

Sometimes, patients with Lyme are even told that they’re autistic!

That’s because in the first months after getting bitten by a disease-carrying tick, often the symptoms of Lyme — fever, chills, muscle aches and swollen glands — aren’t as obvious as the trademark “bullseye” rash you know to look for.

In fact, that rash might never appear at all.

After that first month, if you haven’t noticed any other clues and the Lyme goes untreated, its symptoms can range from facial paralysis to dizziness, nerve pain, heart palpitations, and, of course, memory loss.

And if you get the wrong diagnosis, that means you’ll get the wrong treatment — and who knows what that will do to you?

Sometimes I wonder how many people aren’t so lucky… and NEVER find out what’s really wrong with them… when, in fact, they’ve got a serious but treatable disease.

If you’ve got unexplained symptoms — and you’ve recently been camping, hiking, or just taking a walk through tall grass — get a Lyme test. Unfortunately, they often return false negatives, so ask your doc for both the ELISA and Western Blot tests, and request they send the test out to more than one lab.

When you’re ready to return to the Great Outdoors, keep the critters off your skin by wearing boots — and long pants and sleeves that have been doused in bug spray.

And when you’re back to civilization, check yourself and have someone else check your skin thoroughly. If you find a tick, remove it, and then get tested before any mysterious symptoms appear.

Source:
Kris Kristofferson: An Outlaw at 80
rollingstone.com