Yes that is what i'm worried about. A false positive and unnecessarily flooding my body with antibiotics. I'm willing to try anything at this point. My biggest fear is allowing something to progress to the point it is untreatable.

I might take the Igenex test since I've had lots of exposure to deer ticks and tick bites. I'm trying to dig into all the different lyme testing methods right now and see what make the most scientific sense to me.

The Igenex test is validated (lab tests in all walks of life are validated given what they are used for and what regulatory bodies govern them - GMP, GLP, ISO, CLIA, etc). The contentions part of this lab test seems to be how your test results are interpreted.

I actually emailed igenex, and they sent me thier test list, and cost, for different panels, they were very expensive, hundreds to more than a thousand.
tHE REASON why a non-llmd pcp/specialist, because the tests is not widely accepted, and igenex is a private lab, and thier motivation is to make pure profit, and the tests itself are not recognized by them. Most experimentation of science are done in peer-review journals, like new england of medicine journal, or something like nature or science magazines, these are technical data on experiments that have been done and verified. igenex or chronic lyme disease tests dont have this, there are sites out there claiming they can see lyme in multiple forums, but those are anecdotl, they dont show any evidence.

I had to ask the question: "why is igenex the only one, testing lyme and coinfections, and why a significant portion of thier tests are always positives?
-just another note, chronic lyme believers dont even believe in the accuracy of the test, they use, and instead believe that they have lyme, because thier llmd said so.

I go hunting in the woods all the time lol

Me and ticks go way back...maybe I have Lyme disease.

If Quest does not get your sample in time to discover the bacteria, your local health department may be able to do a better job. (For free) They can usually do the testing within hours of bringing it to the lab. (Former bacteriologist/med tech; also, let them know what's going on with an attached note. We loved a challenge!)


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quest has about as much reputation as igenex, I went to look about quest labs, they were involved in scamming medicare and medi-cal out of alot of money, especially the patients, it was due to the accuracy of thier testing equipments.

i have to use quest due to my insurance and quite a few times i had to redo tests because the numbers were way off.

Quest has lost my results on several occasions. I spent months afraid I had diabetes trying to track down my GTT.

Welcome itemeyes2K.

Labs are unfortunately going to get things wrong.

I have autoimmune Addison's disease, so I get blood work every few months no matter what. Out of all of my blood draws with Quest-only once have I had an issue. Sometimes it depends on the specific branch being sloppy, but my experience with Quest in general has been a good one.

I had Lyme disease when I was 10 years old. I had it for a year before it was caught-because it really wasn't well known. This was around 1989, and I live in NJ. We lived next to the woods, and I had ticks on me all the time. I can say this much about Lyme. Doctors are really torn on it. Even a lot doctors who are not LLMDs consider Lyme to be different than your average bacterial disease. It is a spirochete, as is Syphilis, and both have shown to be more difficult to treat, especially in later stages. There has been medical research that shows that the bacteria can morph into more than one form, causing the treatment difficulties. I was on and off antibiotics for a year when first diagnosed, because I kept relapsing with symptoms.

That isn't to say that I don't think a lot of the Lyme Disease boards are full of very obsessed individuals that are misinformed and paying attention to large quantity of pseudoscience...or that I think huge and dangerous doses of antibiotics are really a good treatment, even if chronic Lyme disease were to be a real thing.

The other possibility is that chronic Lyme is more or less an autoimmune issue that got kicked off by a longer term Lyme infection. Most of my current doctors feel that my being very sick with Lyme as a child (I had a range of symptoms before finally getting diagnosed-crossed eyes, almost constant tinnitus, napping all the time, emotional issues, migrating arthritis, headaches-and finally I woke in the night unable to walk-my knees had completely frozen-this is what finally led to my doctor ordering the test, positive blood work, and diagnosis) could have set me up for health problems later in life, such as the autoimmune Addison's I got diagnosed with about 6 years ago.

Now I have small fiber neuropathy of unknown origin, and every possible cause has been explored. My doctors all know of my Lyme background. When I was desperate this past summer, I did go to a Lyme specialist and had three months of intensive antibiotics therapy, just to see if there was improvement. Sorry to say that this was not the case, and I am unwilling to take endless antibiotics hoping to be cured.

Even if chronic Lyme does exist, there is some real divide about how it should be treated. Some doctors-often the LLMDs-are very insistent on antibiotic therapy. I theorize that this probably did help some people who unknowingly had late stage Lyme disease for a very long time. It is entirely possible, especially if you live in the Northeast. Deer ticks are tiny, and can bite in places you can't even see. Not everyone gets a rash, either. I didn't have one as a kid. Blood tests for Lyme can sometimes be misleading in later stages as well, because it ultimately depends on the person's immune system response since you are testing for the antibodies, and not the actual bacteria...and often times in chronic infections, the immune response can become cyclical. There have been individuals who tested negative, but after a few weeks of treatment and retesting, tested positive. A theory for this is that the antibiotics woke up the fight in the person's immune system.

Of course I claim to be no expert, and have no idea whether real Chronic Lyme exists. I do think there are a lot of people who are being drained of their money and resources, and have become completely fanatical about it.

I do personally feel that if one DOES have Lyme disease, late stage, chronic, acute, or otherwise, there would have been a time in which you might be able to pin point when you got it-rash or no rash. I was sick with what was thought to be a flu for about 3 weeks, more than likely this was the initial infection for me, because it was summer, and certainly flu season. I had a very high fever, and was very ill. Once it subsided, the parade of weird, vague, coming and going symptoms began. There was no doubt that there was something wrong with me.

I'm not sure if this has even been helpful, but I wanted to share my thoughts on it any way.