At present, a vaccination for Lyme disease is not yet available. However, you can certainly take some precautions to reduce the chance of being bitten by ticks.
Here are a few suggestions:
If you are away from home in the outdoors:
- Wear light-colored pants and tuck the bottom of your pants into your socks (to stop them crawling up your leg) and a long-sleeved shirt. This will help you to spot black-legged ticks on your clothing.
- It will also help to spray your clothes and shoes with permethrin repellent and apply insect repellant lotions directly onto your skin.
- When you arrive home or even before getting inside the car, check for any presence of ticks on your body or clothing.
- Carefully inspect your skin folds such as your armpits, waistband, groin, head, scalp, and neck to see if there are ticks hiding.
- Walk along the footpaths as much as possible and avoid walking in longer grass and brushing through shrubs.
- Check your pets’ skin and fur and make sure they do not bring ticks back home from your adventures.
If you are at home and outdoors:
- Check your pets as above.
- Do not let grass grow too long in your yard, regularly mow your lawn.
- Rake fallen leaves as soon as possible as ticks can be found in leaf litter.
- Stack wood in a dry place.
Treatment for Lyme Disease from Ticks
(This covers the AMA medical point of you where are you can poison a body back to health. Which is an oxymoron.)
Not all Lyme disease can be treated with antibiotics, especially if it is misdiagnosed. Those who develop chronic Lyme disease may require several different types of treatment. Treating Lyme disease right away increases your chances of avoiding other serious symptoms that can develop if it is left untreated.
If you notice a tick bite episode and you are in a high-risk area, consult your doctor right away. If you start experiencing unexplained symptoms such as nerve pain, joint pain, excessive fatigue, and heart problems, or as mentioned earlier, flu-like symptoms and a rash, Lyme disease may be a suspect, so ask your doctor.
Oral Antibiotics (for early stages of Lyme disease?)
Oral antibiotics are used as a standard treatment for the early onset of Lyme disease. This has been the standard for many countries and is the only thing that doctors know to use.
These oral antibiotics include doxycycline which can be given to children above 8 years old and adults. Cefuroxime and amoxicillin are more often prescribed to pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and younger children.
Lyme disease patients may undergo a 10, 14 or 21-day antibiotic treatment. It is important to complete the prescribed course. However, the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society or ILADS argue that a short course of antibiotics may only be beneficial for treating acute infections and may not be sufficient to overcome chronic instances of Lyme disease. It may all depend on where the Lyme disease bacteria was stored in the body.
Intravenous Antibiotics
If Lyme disease has progressed and has affected the central nervous system, intravenous antibiotics will then be recommended. This treatment may last for up to 28 days. May not work on all Lyme disease, we are finding issues with some people and traditional treatments.
Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome
Even after undergoing a thorough treatment plan for Lyme disease, some patients report experiencing ongoing fatigue and muscle aches and pain. Experts say these continuing symptoms occur as part of ‘Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome’.
This is because some people tend to develop an autoimmune response that leads to the continuing occurrence of some of their Lyme disease symptoms. However, more studies are still needed to be able to shed light on the continuing occurrence of Lyme disease symptoms that follow a treatment program.
It is an unfortunate statistic that many diagnosed Lyme disease patients cannot even recall being bitten by a tick or seeing any bulls-eye rash on their skin and have no idea how or when they have been infected. That is because it may not have been a tick, but one of many other ways to encounter the bacteria.
Due then to a late diagnosis, dormant bacteria, many of them experience symptoms of chronic Lyme disease such as arthritic pain, memory loss, brain fog and chronic fatigue.
However, since these symptoms are also present in the other types of illnesses previously mentioned, many patients were never immediately checked for Lyme disease, and this now causes them continuing health problems.