Coping

Living with Lyme disease can be a painful and frustrating experience. Many Lyme victims are misdiagnosed, and too often their health deteriorates while they seek proper treatment.

Why is Lyme difficult to diagnose and treat?
There are over 100 different symptoms of Lyme disease, so it’s hard to detect, and even harder to properly diagnose and treat. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for patients to be told that their symptoms are “all in their head”, or to be treated for the wrong disease.
Lyme disease initially affects everyone differently, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe. However, as time passes the disease becomes more debilitating.
Symptoms may come and go in varying degrees, with fluctuation from one symptom to another. Some victims experience a period that feels like remission, only to be followed by another onset of symptoms.
The longer Lyme disease goes untreated, the harder it is to fight. Undiagnosed Lyme disease will affect a patient over the course of their entire lifetime.

Don’t lose hope

There are a variety of treatment options to help everyone from the freshly infected to long-time Lyme sufferers.

Educate yourself

Learn everything you can about your illness. When you know more about the disease, you’ll be more comfortable talking to your doctor about your symptoms and treatment.

Know your treatment options

Early intervention is the key to beating Lyme disease. When caught in the early stages, quick antibiotic treatment can eliminate the infection. When Lyme is diagnosed in the later stages, a patient has several other treatment options to consider.
1Oral Antibiotics – There are four main courses of antibiotic treatments that vary in strength. Each Lyme patient is different, so treatment varies from person to person.
2Intravenous Antibiotics – If oral antibiotics are ineffective, a patient may receive intravenous antibiotics. This is often reserved for those who have been suffering from the disease for an extended period of time before diagnosis.
3Intramuscular Antibiotics – Intramuscular penicillin is sometimes effective for patients who don’t respond to oral and intravenous antibiotics.
4Pulse and Combination Therapy – This treatment involves a careful combination of antibiotic treatments that coincide with symptom flare-ups.

Want to know more about each treatment and what treatment might be best for you?

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Treatment

Lyme treatment is complex. If you’ve recently been diagnosed with Lyme disease, this can be a frustrating and confusing time.

There are various stages of Lyme infection, and treatments differ according to the stage of infection. It’s important to be aware of the various treatment options so that you can help your doctor determine what’s right for you.

The truth about antibiotic treatments

Until recently, many doctors in Canada tended to prescribe only one round of antibiotics, irrespective of the stage of infection. However, current research suggests that a single course of antibiotics is often insufficient for treating Lyme disease, especially if the infection has been untreated for several months.

Two important discoveries have been made:
1Antibiotics are most effective in the early stage of Lyme treatment.
2Co-infections can result in a more complicated case of Lyme disease.

Oral treatment

Oral antibiotics are commonly used to treat Lyme in the early stages. Doctors often prescribe antibiotics over a 2-3 week period which may be insufficient. Treating this disease effectively at this early stage has the best patient outcome, and importantly the risk to benefit weighs heavily on the side of effective treatment.

If you’re still experiencing symptoms after the first round of treatment, your doctor may prescribe additional oral antibiotics or move directly to intravenous medication.

Intravenous treatment

Lyme disease can remain dormant for weeks, months or even years. When symptoms do eventually develop, they can be severe and patients often need aggressive treatment.

Intravenous treatment is often required to treat late-stage infection. Late-stage treatment can last many months as seen in other infections as well. In addition to intravenous antibiotics, patients being treated for late-stage Lyme disease, often receive supportive therapies. For example; physical therapy, antidepressants, anti-inflamatories, stomach acid control. Steroids are not recommended.

Intramuscular treatment

During this treatment, a patient is injected intramuscularly with antibiotics. The slow and sustained release over time means that some people who cannot tolerate oral antibiotics can see remarkable recovery.

Pulse and combination therapy

Pulse and Combination Therapy involves a careful combination of antibiotic treatments that coincide with symptom flare-ups. This is a relatively new treatment option for Lyme disease, but it seems to be effective in certain cases.