Ed, I can't tell you strongly enough that you MUST get blood sent to one of the good labs. The story of how the lab tests and the criteria got so convoluted is bizarre, but one where many different interests converged to produce a bad test the CDC approved. If your western blot had a positive band, I'd be worried. It means you've been exposed, if not to lyme, to an organism similar to it. Just because they only found one antibody at the time means nothing. The chinese menu approach (Have 5 positive bands all at the same time from this group of 8; but if 10 of group B are positive, well, we won't count them because we've got a patent....) makes no sense.

Igenex will tell you if you have any bands and which ones, line by line. And will test for co-infections. For a zillion reasons, many of us with lyme have co-infections. I do.

Do not let your doctor convince you to skip this test. Academic medicine hasn't caught on quite yet, though it's beginning to get around. If you have any other questions about lyme testing, go to the ILADS site, US or Canada, or lymenet.org.

I didn't end up this convinced without doing an awful lot of reading. Over at the lyme board----20,000 people are registered. Countless numbers talk about their pn. Their focus, however, differs from our focus here; their focus is on getting rid of the bug causing the pn.

Good luck. Get tested. http://igenex.com/Website/