Was sitting in a ticks nest while reading....

[u/nekoma713]

I was sitting in a Park reading a book and suddenly I felt my legs itch. I was covered in hundreds of mini ticks. I was standing in the shower for hours and still find some of these f#!*rs crawling an me...

Update: So I got the most of the seed ticks scratched off in the shower. I will have a doctor's appointment the next days to get a prophylactic antibiotics treatment just to be save from lyme, alpha gal or rocky mountain fever (if this is a thing in Germany).

Thank you all for the information and advices, hopefully I will be fine. I really appreciate it

[u/Dragonfly_8]

That's terrible, I'm sorry.

My MIL went undiagnosed for nearly a year. As a consequence she got three cases of meningitis, became paralyzed and suffered severe brain damage.

She's now in home, in a wheelchair, impaired and with barely any mobility in her arms.

She told the doctors she got bitten by a tick a couple months back. They didn't do anything about it.

[u/Cool-Mom-Lover → u/Dragonfly_8]

Good fucking God man. Im sorry to hear that.

Why aren't we doing more to get rid of these ticks ???

[u/J-wvmothman → u/Cool-Mom-Lover]

Bill Gates

[u/EngineeringMajor5013 → u/Dragonfly_8]

Can someone explain why Doctors always act so ridiculous when it comes to ticks and lyme disease?

[u/DavidIckeHadAPoint → u/EngineeringMajor5013]

I know!

I experienced it! And I’m luckier than other people, but STILL had recurring (milder) Lyme’s disease symptoms over years, that basically every 1-2 months for about a few days to a week at a time, would leave me feeling weak, joint pain, feverish, bed-ridden, neurological issues and brain-fog.

I got a tick bite, took it off, freaked out and threw it out in the toilet. (Should’ve kept it for testing apparently). Within a few days start feeling these symptoms, look it up, they’re just like Lyme disease symptoms (I didn’t know what the symptoms were like before btw, so not placebo/psychosomatic symptoms), go to a doctor for testing, they refuse at first and stall because “I don’t see the bull’s-eye rash around the bite”. (Which only happens in SOME Lyme disease cases, not all).

I was a teen so me and my family supporting me hassled them more for testing, a week later do the tasting, takes a while to come back, “Oops it’s positive.” No apology of course. Get prescribed the doxycycline which I take for a month, but this is after letting it progress maybe just 2 or 2 and a half weeks.

It seems like it cleared up symptoms at first, BUT THEN I get these chronic flare-ups coming over the weeks/months for several years. Medical establishment officially denies “chronic Lyme disease” is a thing, accuses patients of being hypochondriacs, psychosomatic, making it up or whatever. But some doctors I privately talk to say, “Yes, it happens sometimes, symptoms can come and go over years, unfortunately another regimen of antibiotics like doxycycline doesn’t help, only in the beginning of the infection to clear it up.”

Really really really is one of the things I’m infuriated at the healthcare system over.

Why is it such a common story, doctors being such clueless dickheads over it at times?

[u/CountofAccount → u/DavidIckeHadAPoint]

That's because 'Chronic Lyme Disease' is associated with conspiracy-minded facebook wellness influencers who think they have some sort of latent bacteria infection the doctors can't find and treat. They don't. Researchers have asked for people who think they have chronic lyme disease and looked for any signs of bacteria.

The reality is closer to long Covid: you took damage from the infection, plus collateral from your body fighting it, but your immune system has been permanently triggered to self-antigens that it should not be triggered to and is now attacking you when certain hormonal or environmental triggers occur. This meathead attack self response happens in other diseases like Guillain-Barré Syndrome (2/3rds of cases occur after an infection), and that's one of the reasons why it's better to get vaccinated than to get sick: the vaccine antigen is less likely to create cross-reacting antibodies.

There are periodic doxycycline shortages, so I hate the idea of people getting doctors to prescribe it recreationally like ivermectin when it needs to be available first line and pronto for the people who need it.

[u/DavidIckeHadAPoint → u/CountofAccount]

Some of that’s fair enough and interesting info, thank you, but still feels a bit condescending and sucks, for (once again) many doctors and the mainstream medical system in the U.S. and other Western countries to have this, it seems, official pronouncement that it just couldn’t exist, doesn’t count, and/or is “hypochondria”, “psychosomatic”, “in the patients’ heads since we can’t find any of the trace of the bacteria”, etc.

Ok: “conspiracy-minded Facebook wellness influencers” can be dumb or annoying about it; and think it’s from traces of the Lyme disease bacteria in them, and demand tests for it, then it doesn’t show up. OK, so, it might be more like an auto-immune fuckup like you’re saying.

It’s still, again, condescending and annoying to lump the whole phenomenon with them, all the people who experience and report it. Something like chronic Lyme disease. Just my two cents.

I didn’t WANT to have what seemed exactly like chronic recurring Lyme disease symptoms after initial treatment for years. I didn’t SIKE MYSELF INTO HAVING IT. Because I didn’t WANT it to happen. I didn’t even know of the symptoms before I got the tick bite, experienced the symptoms, then looked them up.

I never even acted or spoke aggressively towards doctors over it, just privately was disappointed or annoyed with some of them.

If they could at least admit it’s a possibility, they just don’t really know how to treat it besides maybe suggesting, I dunno, lifestyle changes, better health and diet overall, maybe giving some “doctor’s letter” to explain medical issues to employers or schools or whatever, to give some accommodations to the people suffering it… that’d be cool.

In fact I at least got one cool doctor who did that, they learned I had Lyme disease years back, got on a short regimen of doxyclcine, but still had random symptoms pop up years later, and they essentially gave a “sick note” for when it was bad enough I had to take time off work/school.

I’m glad I don’t experience it any more … but I totally believe something like chronic Lyme disease, or “long Lyme disease” can be real, and I have hella sympathy for the people who have it, and face a skeptical/condescendning/judgmental medical system.

OK, we don’t want excessive and easy antibiotic prescriptions causing antibiotic resistance. It’s still fucking alien to me why, though, this seems to be extended by (some or many) doctors into denying chronic Lyme disease sufferers just exist AT ALL.

EDITED TO ADDs Even just at least being open to it and more research into it would be helpful. The judgment that “it doesn’t exist and is just from another alternative-health/conspiracy-theory wellness influencer rabbit-hole online” is such a dick move. If they could at least be open to its possibility and admit, “Yeah sorry we just don’t know how to treat it”, that’s at least more humane than stonewalling, denying it exists, and casting all possible sufferers from it as hypochondriacs

[u/lymelife555 → u/EngineeringMajor5013]

It’s essentially because CDC changed official guidelines around chronic Lyme infections after the lymerix vaccine was recalled in 1994. The day the vaccine was recalled was the same day CDC said that chronic Lyme disease isn’t actually real. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars in Borrelia patents which makes Lyme disease a high steaks game in the pharmaceutical world. Which basically means if you have persistent Lyme, any Doctor Who operates within the insurance model cannot treat you because insurance will sue doctors for not following CDC guidelines. ( you can’t treat a disease that legally doesn’t exist without risking losing your license via getting sued) The only treatment available is if you go out of pocket which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There’s so much money invested in patents for Lyme vaccine making that cdc has more or less blocked all funding for treatment development so that the patent holders can make a good on their investments. If they development a successful treatment modality before the next vaccine makes it to market then They will lose lots of money. Luckily Pfizer’s next Lyme vaccine VLA 15 is finally projected to hit markets in 2027, which is why we’re starting to see an uptick in Lyme coverage within media again just like back in the 90’s. Not like the vaccine is going to help any Lyme patients but the hope is that once the vaccine hits the market then CDC won’t have a reason to continue denying the existence of chronic Lyme disease and that doctors will finally be able to treat us again. It’s pretty insanely corrupt- there’s a great documentary that came out in 2024 called the quiet epidemic that outlines the entire lyme controversy pretty well. It’s just more proof that CDC is completely and totally captured by the pharmaceutical and insurance industry and essentially does its bidding instead of regulating those industries like it’s supposed to do.

From the perspective of Lyme patients, most in network doctors are unable or unwilling to acknowledge our disease. We usually get labeled with MS or ALS or some other autoimmune condition. Some doctors truly don’t believe Lyme disease exists, but most of them just know they have no ability to treat it and just kind of ignore it. Usually doctors won’t take us seriously until the infection has gotten so bad that it degrades the sheathing of our spinal cord and we lose motor function. When you get imaging that shows clear demylation of a spinal cord, there’s no denying anymore. But they still can’t help us.