Bruce Shilton’s crippling fatigue left him bedridden for six months. Sue Faber was so forgetful, she couldn’t remember her daughters’ birthdates. And Andrea Smith’s relentless aches sent her into a deep depression.All three Canadians say they are struggling with a chronic form of Lyme disease and feel abandoned by Canada’s health-care system.The challenge for them, and other patients with Lyme, is that the medical community is divided on how best to diagnose and treat this controversial disease.On one side of this deep divide are mainstream doctors who say Lyme is easy to diagnose with standard testing, and the prevailing treatment — a short course of antibiotics — is enough to kill the bacteria that causes the disease. They believe patients who think they have chronic Lyme but have no evidence of infection are grappling with other illnesses and that treating for Lyme masks the real cause of their symptoms and does more harm than good.On the other side are doctors who say this is an extremely complex disease. It is often called “The Great Imitator” because its symptoms mimic other diseases and can affect any part of the body, including the brain, heart and nervous system. They say the standard testing is flawed, resulting in missed cases and misdiagnosis, and if it’s not caught early the required treatment is longer antibiotic use. In Canada, treatment is based on guidelines established in the United States. But several states have passed doctor-protection laws that allow physicians to treat Lyme more aggressively with longer-term antibiotics. Here, however, physicians typically refuse to treat chronic Lyme, or they do so quietly so that regulatory agencies don’t find out.This leaves desperately ill patients with few options, which is especially troubling because research shows people with Lyme are at greater risk for suicide. They say they are met with outright disbelief from some doctors who ref ...
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