Diagnostic pathways of patients consulting at the infectious diseases ward for presumed Lyme disease (preprint), 2020, Lutaud et al

Open access:
https://hal-amu.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02915010/document

 

It's almost certain that not all those cases will be Lyme disease but the diagnosis of Lyme disease is very unreliable. This happens to be a very topical issue right now, that tests are not always reliable. Even about the most important diagnosis in the world, the whole of medicine focused on it and, still, very unreliable. This flaw is currently talked about on a daily basis, is central to the difficulties we face with the pandemic. This is even widely known about Lyme disease.

Yet these people can't possibly imagine that. Now that's a failure of the diagnostic process if I've ever seen one. I'm not exactly clear what aspect of this falls under "patient empowerment". As powers go, this is as powerless as it gets.

And their suggestion is to do the thing that has failed for decades, has no chance of success because gaslighting is exclusive with a so-called "therapeutic alliance" and has basically no room left to grow, since it's fundamentally contrarian and gets no benefit from technological progress, other than in eventually fully invalidating.

So in a nutshell this is the failure blaming the failed. Brilliant. Smart. These people went to school for ten years and this is what they do with it. Catholic priests used to do that for free. Demons. Conversion disorder. Same difference.

 

The inclusion criteria are silly, and are predictive of the findings. What does France know about Borrelia other than what the US tells it? If they used the 2T CDC testing to argue no clinical evidence for Lyme, there's more than a fair chance some of these poor souls in fact had/have Lyme. Who's doing the presuming here?

 

Contrarian opinions never have to make sense. Some people really, really like being wrong. It's seriously weird. They would bash their own face with a shovel before admitting to have ever been wrong.

 

Yep.

They build a mouse trap that, it would appear, in their eyes at least, virtually ensures they catch no person with Lyme, then appear to scratch their heads at delusional patients' beliefs they have Lyme.

Is it possible the patients know something these researchers do not? Hard to tell from the abstract. Where did these guys pull the "LD is confirmed in only 10% - 20% of patients", I wonder? What patients? Confirmed how? Do these participants have other Lyme data that does not conform to IDSA-type requisites?

That Lyme and other TBD's occupy a landscape riddled with diagnostic liabilities seems of little concern to these researchers, so long as they can introduce MUS.