S.L.A.M. Sturbridge Lyme Awareness of Massachusetts

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⏰ Less Than Two Weeks Left to Apply! ⏰

The deadline to apply for a LymeLight Foundation Grant is FRIDAY, AUGUST 14th! Our grants help children and young adults (through age 25) across the U.S. access Lyme disease treatment when financial barriers stand in the way. 💚

Don't miss your opportunity to apply! Learn more and submit your application (also linked in bio): lymelightfoundation.org/grants

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This patient spent 8 years being told it was anxiety, then depression, then fibromyalgia. One doctor told her to stop reading medical journals.

By month three of real treatment, she stopped bringing her binder. By month six, she had cognitive improvement she hadn't felt in years. By month 14, she wrote this note.

It wasn't a perfect protocol. It was a provider who believed her enough to look deeper. 🍃

How a Bay Area nonprofit and small specialty lab could change the face of Lyme disease - San Francisco Business Times Can a nonprofit and small test maker change the face of Lyme disease?

Condolences💚

Obituary information for Dr. Brandon Lyon Jutras View Dr. Brandon Lyon Jutras's obituary, contribute to their memorial, see their funeral service details, and more.

RFK Jr. just revealed on Fox News that Lyme disease, RSV, and COVID are all likely products of Gain of Function research.

Gain of Function research is responsible for the deaths of millions worldwide with nothing to show for it.

RFK Jr. has announced that the U.S. will no longer allow this dangerous experimentation, and doctors and organizations found conducting it will face severe consequences.

Hopefully, other countries around the world follow suit.

For four years the working number was 5–7%. That's what HHS used. That's what a lot of us quietly used too, because it let us treat Long Covid as a rounding error that would resolve itself.

A study published in JAMA Network Open in May put it at 16.3%. Roughly one in six. Nearly 458,000 patients across 58 US hospitals.

That's not a rounding error. That's a workforce problem, a disability problem, and for anyone running a clinic, a caseload you are already carrying whether or not you've coded for it.

Here's the part that should bother us more than the number: the same analysis found new cases still accumulating through mid-2024. The comfortable story was that Long Covid was an artifact of the early waves, a 2020–21 phenomenon that would age out. It didn't age out.

I've seen this movie before. I spent three decades treating patients with vector-borne illness whose symptoms outlasted the textbook, and the institutional response was to keep the textbook and revise the patients. Reclassify them. Suggest they were anxious. Cite the absence of evidence we hadn't gone looking for.

The mechanistic work is now moving fast: Viral protein persistence, T-cell activation in tissue, imaging evidence of neuronal injury. None of it is settled. All of it is more than we had.

If you're a doc who quietly wrote these patients off in 2022, this is a good week to reopen the file. I've had to do it before. It's uncomfortable but it's part of the job.

Amen💚

Lymies can relate.

Someone posted recently that she missed her best friend's wedding because she was too sick to go. And hasn't heard from her friend since.

Hundreds of people liked it. Almost nobody shared it.

That ratio says something. People recognized themselves and didn't want anyone to know.

I've had this conversation with patients for thirty years. Chronic illness takes the body first. Then it takes the people who don't understand the repeated cancellations. The second loss is the one nobody talks about.

For the friend who stopped calling, it's not too late. A text, not to ask how a patient is feeling, just to be there, can mean a lot.