What is Chronic Lyme Disease?
For most people who develop Lyme disease, their journey with the disease ends after being successfully treated with antibiotics for a few weeks. Unfortunately, some people continue to experience symptoms of Lyme disease months or even years after treatment. What’s often referred to as post Lyme disease syndrome or post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), chronic Lyme disease is a debilitating struggle for some Lyme sufferers. Chronic Lyme can cause patients to feel symptoms such as fatigue, joint and muscle aches, brain fog, and light sensitivity after antibiotic treatment.
Because the symptoms of Lyme disease are vague, many patients are misdiagnosed with similar illnesses—unaware the treatments will do nothing to ease their pain. It can take months or years of living with mysterious symptoms and pain before patients and doctors consider Lyme disease to have been the cause.
Chronic Lyme disease is a hotly-debated term between medical professionals and the chronic Lyme disease community. The medical community generally rejects the term and continues to push that their patients’ symptoms are not from exposure to the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium. This has caused the Lyme community to feel unrepresented and ignored by doctors—the very people who are supposed to help them with their pain.
It’s not known why some people continue to experience these types of symptoms after treatment, nor what exactly causes chronic Lyme symptoms. But the pain chronic Lyme sufferers experience has shown to decrease their quality of life significantly compared to other chronic illnesses.
If you feel you have been misdiagnosed and may be suffering from chronic Lyme disease, find your nearest Lyme-literate doctor here.
