NEWS: Doctors, patients seek better insight into Lyme disease
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, attorney Barbara Arnold paid $200,000 out-of-pocket for Lyme treatment. The article also mentions LymeDisease.org’s recent SF protest against the IDSA.
From the San Francisco Chronicle
(on-line Oct.22, 2013, in print Oct. 23, 2013)
By Stephanie Lee
One morning in June 2002, Barbara Arnold stepped into her shower, looked down at her torso and saw a tiny black tick, not much larger than a poppy seed.
She plucked it off and figured it had landed there the day before, when she’d been clearing leaves in her yard.
At the time, Arnold lived 20 miles from Lyme, Conn., where Lyme disease, now the most common tick-borne illness in the Northern Hemisphere, first appeared in the United States in the 1970s.
Later in the day, Arnold took a trip to an urgent care clinic after a rash appeared. Doctors ignored this signature sign of Lyme, gave her two weeks’ worth of antibiotics and told her she’d be fine, that the treatments would take care of any health threats from the tick bite.
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Please read the story and leave comments on the newspaper’s website.
Chronic lyme is real and has caused me much grief over the past 10+ years. It’s a shame that your average doctor has no clue about how to treat it. I haven’t been able to work since 2005 and I have been to over 25 physicians and specialists and only a handful have been helpful to me at all. In fact, many have been downright hurtful. I have had over 10 diagnoses and been accused of mental illness as well as hypochondriasis. I have been yelled at, told I was “over-treated” and been refused testing or treatment by physicians. I have been referred out more times than I care to remember.
Three doctors told me I’d be in a wheelchair by 2008, but thankfully that never happened. I did have leg braces that I had to wear anytime I left the house. I refused to give up, even when my medical providers had. This disease is real. It doesn’t matter how long they continue to deny it, it still remains and harms and disables and kills many, many each day.
I hope that someday adequate and effective treatment will be available for everyone who needs it. It is an insidious, complex and miserable plight for anyone effected. Unfortunately, health, family, friends, hopes and dreams are all a part of the degradation involved.
I am lucky that I received some treatment from two ILADS trained doctors. I just wish continued treatments were possible. I know many don’t even get that far.
This is a huge issue and I hope that some progress can be made soon.
Barbara Arnold has been an incredible advocate for assisting Lyme sufferers get SSDI and SSI. The government wants to throw up every barrier possible to make the lives of Lymies absolutely horrifying.
I have found Barbara Arnold to be one of the kindest and best advocates for us out there.