Advocates with Lyme disease are calling on all levels of government in Canada to improve testing and treatment for the illness.
The disease is spread by a bite from an infected black legged tick that introduces bacteria into the bloodstream. Without antibiotic treatment, it can cause a complicated, serious illness.
In Ottawa there were only 10 reported cases of the disease last year, but advocates and medical officials say it's likely under reported because early symptoms can be misdiagnosed.
The disease shares many symptoms with other diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), meningitis or chronic fatigue.
Dr. Carolyn Pim, Ottawa's associate medical officer of health, said Lyme disease is often mistaken for fibromyalgia or MS.
"In the early stages the blood tests can be negative so they should be repeated. If people have inaccurate diagnosis it's challenging not to have the symptoms treated," said Pim.

Blood tests not accurate, advocate says

But according to Jim Wilson, head of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, blood tests conducted in Canada are part of the problem.
"The tests are not that accurate," said Wilson, who had the disease, as did his daughter, who now has a pacemaker.
"We have many strains of the Lyme bacteria. We're only testing for one strain of one species … we think that is horribly wrong."
Ottawa resident Heather King, 38, told CBC News she has been forced to go to the United States for treatment of Lyme disease because doctors here do not know enough about the illness.
Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May introduced a private member's bill in June calling for a national action plan to improve the testing, diagnosis, and treatment of Lyme disease.




                    
 

Why is Lyme Disease Not JUST a Tick-Borne Disease Any More?       

February 05, 2012 |259,067views| + Add to Favorites           
Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD is well known for his successful treatment of neurological illness and chronic pain with Integrative Medicine.
Here, he shares his latest insights into Lyme disease, including its causes, confounding factors that can make proper diagnosis elusive, and how to get around them, along with his own treatment protocol.
By Dr. Mercola
Some experts feel that almost everyone has been exposed to Lyme disease and may have it in one way, shape or form.
Whether that's true or not is up for debate, but clearly there are those who have it and are severely disabled by it.
Dr. Klinghardt—who is one of my earliest mentors in natural health and always on the leading edge—has actually suffered with Lyme disease himself, and as a result, he's passionate about finding effective natural treatments for Lyme.

The Ongoing Discovery of Lyme Disease

It's now been fairly well-established that chronic infection is an underlying factor in most chronic illnesses. Diseases such as Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue are all turning out to be expressions of chronic infections.
"Right at the center of that is the ongoing discovery of Lyme disease," Dr. Klinghardt says.
Lyme disease has recently received a new definition. It now refers to illnesses transferred by insects, as opposed to simply a tick-borne disease. Mosquitoes can carry Lyme disease and many other serious infections, as can spiders, fleas and mites.
"Today I take a very different approach to Lyme disease," Dr. Klinghardt says. "I look at it as nature mingling with our genes. They are trying to incorporate their genome into our genome… Most of the time it goes wrong but sometimes it goes well. This is like the point I want to make upfront; that I take this more evolutionary view of it.
… We know that Lyme spirochetes were around for a long time but something happened maybe 30-40 years ago, where the creatures became more aggressive, more penetrating, and more illness-producing than they were before. Some of us suspect it's a man-made element. Some of us suspect that the global warming may play a role in it.
I personally suspect that the exposure to electromagnetic fields in the home and the microwaves from cell phone radiation are driving the virulence of many of the microbes that are naturally in us, and makes them aggressive and illness producing. There is probably evidence for all sides of the discussion."

Why Lyme Disease is So Tough to Diagnose…

Lyme disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose using conventional tests. And there's great variation in the presentation of the disease as well, depending on where you contracted it, and whether or not you have any other coexisting infections. There is a group of seven or eight microbes that are the most common. The worst ones are Babesia microti and the different forms of Bartonella.
"Underneath that, there's often an infection with Mycoplasma. We still don't know if it's really transferred with the same bite or if the people had it all along and become symptomatic when the immune system is suppressed by the spirochetes," Dr. Klinghardt says.
Other than the co-infections, there is what I call the "opportunistic infections." The combined effect of the initial infection is an immune suppressive effect, and then the patient becomes vulnerable to all sorts of other things. The most common things people contract early on in the course if the illness are different forms of parasites, such as protozoa; Babesia itself being one of them.
There is Giardia, amoebas, Trichomonas, malaria, and different forms of infections that aren't labeled yet. There is a new one, called FL1953. Stephen Frye discovered that. It's a protozoan organism that's causing severe fatigue and illness in chronically ill people. It's almost always present in a patient with Lyme disease.
And then we find a lot of worms in people. They may be microscopic and they may be macroscopic. That means they may be visible in the stool or they may not be visible."

Common Presentations of Lyme Disease

The most simple presentation is the orthopedic forms of Lyme disease as they're typically more superficial, affecting the larger joints. Interestingly, Dr. Klinghardt injects ozone into the joint in these cases, which he claims is:
"100 percent effective if the Lyme disease or… whatever the microbe is, lives in the joint and is confined to the joint space. Simply putting ozone in the joint will kill the spirochetes, and often with one, sometimes two treatments, make the joint completely pain free. That's one form of the expression of Lyme."
When the microbes and the associated immune reactions are situated in the connective tissue, the infection presents as a "vague, dispersed pain," which oftentimes ends up being labeled as fibromyalgia by conventional doctors. The immunological expression of Lyme covers a wide variety of immune system disorders, typically with some aspect of autoimmunity.
"I did my thesis in 1976 on autoimmune diseases and how the autonomic nervous system interacts with the immune system," Dr. Klinghardt says. "We found then that the determining factor of the outcome of an autoimmune disease was the presence of microbes that were catastrophically unresponsive to antibiotics.
Any autoimmune disease, including rheumatoid arthritis, we suspect has an underlying level of Lyme disease that needs to be treated appropriately before the patient has a chance to recover from the illness."
The gastroenterological presentation, where you have constant stomach problems, constipation, recurring stomach ulcers and/or indigestion, is very common, especially with the Babesia infection. This is sometimes the direct outcome of pancreatitis or hepatitis, but it can also be due to parasites acquired after contracting Lyme disease. In these cases, aggressive treatment of the parasites typically resolves the problem.
"The most startling form of the expression of Lyme disease is a wide variety of neurological illnesses," Dr. Klinghardt says.
"That is what we specialize in… We see a lot of cases with multiple sclerosis (MS)… ALS… [and] everything in between: the chronic fatigued patients, the patient with vague, undistinguishable neurological symptoms, the feeling of buzzing in the head, buzzing on the skin, crawling under the skin…"

How to Diagnose Lyme Disease

Insomnia is one of the key symptoms in many cases of Lyme disease, along with neurological symptoms such as headaches and a wide variety of pain syndromes. But you cannot diagnose Lyme disease on symptoms alone, because they're so varied.
Testing is required, but even that is not a sure-shot…
Most commercial tests designed to detect chronic infections are based on measuring your immune reaction—the presence of antibodies—to the invading microbe. However, one of the primary cells that get infected with Lyme spirochetes are the white blood cells themselves, which is a bit of a game-changer… because if your white blood cells are infected, they lose the ability to produce antibodies.
Hence it is relatively common to get a negative test result…
Dr. Klinghardt refers to this as "the Lyme paradox," because in order to diagnose Lyme disease properly with one of the accepted commercial tests, you have to first treat the Lyme disease, in order for your white blood cells to be able to mount an appropriate immune response. Only then can a lab test be used to detect the presence of Lyme disease.
"An exception to that are the test based on direct microscopy, where you're not depending on the immune responses for the patient," he explains.
However, this too has its drawbacks and difficulties. For example, the FISH test for Babesia is done on blood. But Babesia lives in the central nervous system, joints, and connective tissue. It doesn't live in your blood stream, at least not in significant amounts, so it can easily be missed when looking at blood.
To get around the many testing conundrums surrounding Lyme, whenever he suspects Lyme, Dr. Klinghardt treats his patients for Lyme disease for at least six to eight weeks, followed by a Western blot test, which measures immune response. The treatment is initially based on the clinical symptoms presented, along with a form of muscle testing he developed, called autonomic response testing (ART), which incorporates both classical neurological testing and kinesiology.
"It's not related to the applied kinesiology system that's quite distinct," Dr. Klinghardt explains. "It... may look similar… [but] we're looking for very specific reflexes that are connected to very specific illnesses. We arrive at a tentative diagnosis through history taking, through looking at skin signs; palpating the tissues; testing the normal neurological reflexes; orthopedic tests, and then we add the muscle testing as an additional tool."

Tests and Lab Recommendations

Dr. Klinghardt exclusively uses the IGeneX Lab in Palo Alto for his blood tests, and Fry Labs in Arizona for direct microscopy testing.
"I don't have a financial investment in it, but it's the gold standard in our field," he says. "They use two different antigens. The commercial labs and hospitals and so forth, they use one antigen and are notorious in under-diagnosing Lyme disease. We recommend to rather not test it than get a false negative, which will sometimes lead the patient 20 years on the wrong track. With the other co-infections, the detection rate drops way down.
… We do the FISH test [for Borrelia] at IGeneX Lab. It's a direct microscopy test which has more false negatives than the western blot.
… The leading test for Bartonella that we use is Fry Labs in Arizona. Steven Fry, who does a wonderful direct microscopy test, often comes back positive with the diagnosis of hemobartonella. Hemo means simply blood – Bartonella in the blood. Remember, he's testing the blood where the Bartonella typically does not live. It lives in the nervous system. So if you find it in the blood in small amounts it generally is an indicator that there is a high amount in other tissues in the body."
An indirect test is the CD57 test. "CD-57" is a specific group of natural killer cells that are particularly damaged by the Lyme spirochetes. Therefore, if your numbers drop to a certain level, it is an indirect indicator that you may have Lyme disease, because the only known infection to suppress CD57 is that of Borrelia burgdorferi.
Normally, your CD57 value should be over 100. If it's lower than that, you're infected with Borrelia. If it's below 60, you probably have both Borrelia and Mycoplasma, and, most likely, some other co-infections.