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  • From: "GlenEcoFarm" <Glenecofarm AT planetcomm.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Lyme Disease
  • Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:21:39 -0500

With all of the posts on this list in the past several years relating to people struggling with deer control issues, I'm surprised that very few have brought up the subject of Lyme disease which seems to be increasing in the same proportion as the deer encroachment all over the country.

I was recently diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease more than a year after my symptoms began getting serious in December 2008. I had been treated with one month of antibiotics following a reactive tick bite in August 2002. We think there is a possability that the infection may have resurfaced five or more years after the tick bite and simmered at a low enough level for me not to seek medical attention until last year, or I may have been reinfected later.

The most appalling thing about this experience has been the amount of frustration, pain, and loss of physical strength I have experienced in the face of apparent ignorance and apathy among the local medical community. About six months after a brain MRI showed white spots indicative of possible Lyme, I learned that the blood test used to rule out LD by the neurologist who saw me after the MRI, is widely known among the larger medical community to give false negatives and is unreliable for Lyme diagnostics. As I began to realize late in the year that I might need to more agressively persue the LD question, I went into another month of my own denial after looking on the Internet and learning the extent of the Lyme disease controversy and what it might mean if I really do have Lyme.

I feel quite fortunate to have found a doctor competent in the most up to date diagnosis and treatment of my illness even if it meant crossing two state lines to find him. I now face the possability of considerable pain and disability and a lot of expense for several more years. Just knowing that I now have a solid diagnosis and a treatment protocol designed to attack the problem at the roots rather than lessening the pain at the surface (like fighting quackgrass with a weed whacker or trying to put out a forest fire by pissing on it), gives me hope.

I bring this subject up because most of us involved in market farming live and work in highly endemic areas (by now most of the country) and are highly at risk of contracting this dreadful and nasty disease. Complicating the matter is disagreement about the definition of the illness, fear among doctors of reprisal if they transgress treatment guidelines of the CDC, and the reluctance of insurance compaies to pay for extended treatment of LD patients. This makes it very difficult to find good LD doctors. The longer it goes after a person gets the disease the more difficult and expensive it gets to treat.

My symptoms have been: extreme fatigue, panic attacks, peripheral neuropathy, full blown fibromyalgia, and pain-pain-pain, and MORE PAIN! Those of you or your friends who may be struggling with CFS or Fibromyalgia take note. Remember what your doctors have told you? There are now many who believe that a high proportion of those diagnosed with these illnesses actually have Lyme disease.

Marlin Burkholder
Shenandoah Valley
Virginia




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