Will There Ever Be An Accurate Test for Lyme Disease? A Reference Booklet For Lyme Patients By

Lyme Disease is a complex systemic disease that is caused by highly motile bacterium in the spirochete family. The bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi was first isolated from the skin of a Lyme patient with the distinctive bull’s-eye rash in the early 1980s. Since that time, culturing the elusive bacterium has been difficult, frustratingly unpredictable, and miserably inconsistent. Borrelia burgdorferi can very quickly move from the site of a tick bite into the circulatory system, where it can circulate throughout the body. This unique bacterium has a distinct and insidious method for passing through the capillary walls of blood vessels and nestling its way deep inside many organs and tissues of the human body. In animal models, the Lyme spirochete within mere hours of a tick bite, can cause a breakdown of the blood-brain-barrier. It is the bacteria’s ability to exit the blood stream, hide, and survive that makes Lyme disease so difficult to detect with any one test. It is the unique microbiology of the bacteria that gives it the ability to hide and survive undetected within the human body. That is why using other bacterial diseases as a model for Lyme disease is difficult and leads to misunderstandings in the medical community on how to diagnose and treat Lyme disease. Infections causd by the family of bacteria known as Borrelia are unique n their microbiology and cannot be dismissed with a rubber stamped one-treatment-fits-all approach. i There are five main methods of testing for Lyme disease