Having been in a wheelchair with oxygen support and loss of swallow reflex. Signs pointing to ALS. The culprit was Lyme Disease. Took 12 years to find. It is time that Yale admits they had patent on Borrelia and it's ability to morph into several stages that are difficult to detect and understand, let alone treat. When IGENEX Lab did my testing, at my expense, the antibodies for Borrelia Borgdurferi, Borrelia Hermsli, Babesia WA1 and Babesia Microti were identified. So many years after the fact in my case!!! When I finally had the testing my long battle for health was at last making sense. When long term IV therapy, with several drugs, was introduced my body became whole and I found me again. I am walking, talking, swallowing and living a life I feel I deserve after being told that my engorged tick, taken from the back of my head in 1989, could not possibly be Lyme tick because "there is no Lyme Disease in Texas." For this reason I was not treated and went through many symptoms and surgeries to include a brain artery rupture. My immune system tried to fight something that the Infectious Disease Doctors would now treat with an oral antibiotic. Back in the 1970's and 1980's many of us were told we did not have Lyme Disease and were not tested. A family member heard the story of a patient that paralleled my symptoms, to include at the time a rash, brain fog, extreme fatigue, vision problems that could not be explained and down the road a few years later - surgeries for tumors of unexplained origin and fast degenerating osteoarthritis that included two shoulder surgeries spinal fusion and brain aneurysm rupture. The patient that paralleled my health had been lucky to have been tested and found to be Lyme Positive. How does the infectious disease community explain this??? How many thousands of other patients will have to suffer at the hands of medical folks that are so sure of themselves that only the tests that back up their dictates, is used. Also, only their medical protocol is the correct one when there are so many unanswered questions and so much cover up. So many patients have been made to live a life of hell. Do you really think that patients want expensive drugs and hours taken out of the day to infuse them? Certainly not! But, to give drugs only for directed time, limits the possibility of living a good life, opposed to that of a helpless sick, disabled human. This disease may never be eradicated, but possibly controlled, that is what concerns patients that are fighting for the chance to live instead of just exist. I applaud the Lyme Literate medical community for admitting that this disease is NOT an easy one to treat and if you don't clear up in a certain time, esp. if not given any medication way back when the possibility of the disease became apparent, that you treat the patient as an individual. Every time I hear the phrase that it is detrimental to have ongoing antibiotic therapy it just galls me. If I had had the amount of time limits you wish to impose I would still be wheelchair bound and be an ALS, Alzheimer patient. Your studies never went long enough to give the patient like myself time to heal so - just maybe you are in the wrong. This is such a firefight. There must be something to long term IV therapy because thousands of people are trying to tell you that they have and are being helped and you have closed your ears and mind to a disease that just may be the most difficult one you have ever come across. Every infectious disease doctor that Tricare referred me to (three) stated that their office did not treat Lyme Disease. What is going on with your specialty area? If it is so easy to treat and we hear the protocols from the President of your Association with such Bravado then why the hesitancy? If venereal herpes is treated with daily Valtrex, an antiviral, maybe Lyme might possibly be treated with a daily antibiotic. I do know that one of my kidney infections took 6 months of antibiotics to clear. So I think you know where many of us are going with this. Your tests were too short to be of any significance with this morphetic, horrific, complicated disease and you just will not admit it. So many doctors were disregarded with their imput and the patient suffering this disease are one up on most of you. Let us work together and find a way to allow patients to live an active life. Some syphilis patients are on antibiotics for the duration of their lives. This disease, from my studies, is much easier to understand and treat than Borrelia because of Borrelia's often involved with a co-infection. Respectfully, Pam R.N.