A free web-based expert system for medical diagnostics could save a lot of lives. It's really something that should be tackled by the government (because of liability issue).
Instead, we have shitty scaremongering websites that list similar symptoms for most diseases, don't give any probabilities, don't tell you what tests are available and instead tell you to "contact your physician".
Overtreatment and overdiagnosis is also a thing. How would you like receiving thousands of dollars of testing every time you visited the doc?
There will be bad docs like in any field but its presumptuous to think most don't know what they're doing.
I'm talking about an expert system. You enter symptoms. It asks you questions. Then it says something "there a high probability you have X and medium probability you have Y".
They stopped giving it out.
It would be nice to have an expert system to guide you through things. I wouldn't mind if it "paused the dignosis" like:
"It could be A, B or C. Look for <symptom> or try <action> to narrow it down"
Now that I think of it, I have used basically one expert systems in my life. It was the windows diagnosis thing.. "did that fix your problem?" the only thing it fixed was a network problem, once.
I can't tell if this is a subtle joke or an egregious editing failure.
My strategy? Go online and illegally buy doxycycline intended for fish tanks. The pills are exactly the same color, shape, and size as what you'd get from a pharmacy. If you find a tick on yourself, remove the tick correctly (do not crush his body), then crush a pill and make a paste, which you should apply topically.
If you wait to see a rash, you've waited too long. If you wait until you feel sick a few weeks later, you've waited too long. There are studies that report the rash appears only about half the time, and the blood tests are inaccurate for the first month or so after exposure.
This is a good demonstration of the risk of taking medical advice from random internet strangers. nickysielicki's advice is useless at best, and it can do harm if someone is relying on it to protect them from infection. In particular, if you have the doxycycline tablets, you'd be better off swallowing one rather than trying to make some kind of salve with it. Better yet, do some research and talk to a qualified medical professional about borreliosis prevention.
Genetically, Lyme Disease is very close to syphilis. It's also a spirochete, and it is the new "Great Imitator." (1) The main difficult thing about Lyme Disease is that the tests for it currently are not that good. There are a lot of false positives / negatives, and there is no test that show whether a patient has been cured, only whether they've ever been infected.
Neurological Lyme aka neuroborreliosis can cause a number of neurological / psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms like OCD. Doctors never check for Lyme when a patient presents with sudden onset psych problems, even though it's a known cause.
TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.
(1) interesting side note -- there are some studies that suggest it can also be sexually transmitting and/or transmitted from mother to child
> "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent," Gantry said. "For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent."
Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.
With respect to false positives/negatives, use the igenex test. If you get a good doctor, he'll know how to interpret the results better; you can have high results in certain bands which the CDC does not usually consider relevant but which can still be indicative.
All that aside, no responsible doc "just gives you the drugs". Let's not forget there are a thousand things it could be; just giving the drugs for all would probably kill you. Also, that's how we end up with resistant bacteria.
1) There are different strains of Lyme disease (and other tick-borne diseases) and certain antibiotics are more effective than others.
2) Using antibiotics where it turns out they might not be needed only contributes to growing antibiotic ineffectiveness.
I got rocky mountain spotted fever, and was treated for that. It's easy to see cause your body gets spots along with pretty nasty illness. During that course, I was also treated for Lyme as well.
The key here: I was bitten by the primary carriers of lyme and spotted fever, and had one of those diseases. I'm not recommending everybody be given lyme antiparasiticals - but use some critical thought here. We can tell when we've upped our risk significantly. And some doc that talks for 5 min sure doesn't really have much vested interest.