FIGHTING TREATMENTS FOR LYME DISEASE.

FIGHTING TREATMENTS FOR LYME DISEASE. Lyme disease is a major problem in our area. My knowledge on it is anecdotal, but there are lots of anecdotes. Ten years ago, I counted up from memory the people I knew who had Lyme disease. There were over 75 on a quick count, and there have been many more since then. There are a lot of unknowns about Lyme disease. It is hard to diagnose. The consequences can be severe–physical crippling and sometimes mental impairment. I know of a number of people whose lives have been severely damaged by the disease. Based on victims we know, treatment by antibiotics for long-term Lyme disease can help, but there is great controversy about that treatment. One of our local newspapers reports that Connecticut has just passed a law that “a physician can prescribe long-term antibiotics to a patient with chronic Lyme disease without the possibility of receiving disciplinary action by the Department of Public Health and the Connecticut Medical Examining Board only because of prescribing the antibiotics.” That’s right. Using antibiotics to treat long-term Lyme disease could have subjected a doctor to disciplinary action. The law is controversial. Steven Novella, assistant professor of neurology at Yale, says “”I think it’s a terrible bill from a political and scientific point of view…. The only mechanism we can use to hold [the doctors] to a scientific standard of care is the state enforcing the standard of care in order to protect the public from harmful. [sic—there is no noun after “harmful” in the article, so it’s not clear what harms are referred to or what is known about those harms.]