Dr Al Miller Lyme Disease

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• Didn’t listen or answer questions
• Didn’t trust the provider’s decisions

Nightside With Dan Rea

Police Confidence Is Way Down. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans confidence in police has fallen to a historic low. The poll reveals that confidence in police has fallen 5 points to 48%, making it the first time in the 27 year trend that it falls below the majority level. In the past, confidence in police has been as much as 64%. This drop in confidence is largely in part due to the death of George Floyd, who died this year at the hands of police. Furthermore, in this current poll, there is a large racial divide where 56% of White adults say they have a great deal of confidence in police whereas only 19% of Black adults say the same. Do these findings concern you?

Combating Lyme Disease. What is Lyme Disease? Well, its a bacterial infection you get from the bite of an infected tick. If left untreated, this disease can cause you serious problems, including serious neurological issues later in life. Longtime Nightside guest, Dr. Alfred Miller joins Dan to inform the audience about the dangers of Lyme disease and what to do after getting a tick bite. Get your questions ready!

Untreated Depression Has Severe Consequences:

A friend of one of my brothers had been suffering for years from headaches, fatigue, a sense of despair, a belief that she wasnt worthy of her job or her boyfriend. She was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and was treated with antibiotics, which were ineffective.

What she wasnt treated for, and could have been, was severe depression. She killed herself.

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Current Challenges And Future Priorities

Patients with PTLD represent a substantial burden to the United States health care system. In a large, health insurance claims analysis of 47 million members, estimated total direct medical costs from Lyme disease were between $712 million and $1.3 billion per year, with a significant portion of these specifically due to PTLD-related costs . The same study found that the adjusted odds of any PTLD-related symptom diagnosis following Lyme disease was 4.77 higher than age-, sex-, enrollment year-, region- and payer type-matched controls without Lyme disease, and that those patients with Lyme disease who went on to have at least one PTLD symptom had over twice the average total health care costs as those who did not . These cost estimates do not reflect additional indirect, non-medical, and lost productivity costs to patients, which may be substantial in a population with a chronic and significant illness impact on quality of life . Novel preventative approaches to reduce incidence of new Lyme disease cases, as well as physician and community educational interventions to increase awareness and reduce diagnostic delays and misdiagnosis, are needed to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.

A Missed Diagnosis Of Lyme Disease

Shortly after Dr. Miller retired, his 43-year-old daughter-in-law, living in Boston, came down with a mysterious illness. She was evaluated by top doctors at three prestigious teaching hospitals, and given a terminal diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis .

But, according to Dr. Miller, something didnt line up. Although she had all the symptoms of ALS, he thought the lesions in her MRI looked more like multiple sclerosis.

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrigs disease, is a progressive degenerative nerve disease with no cure. Not willing to accept this diagnosis for his daughter-in-law without being extra-sure, Dr. Miller did some research.

He states, When I went to the medical literature, the only illness that could present the MRI of the brain of MS and the physical findings of ALS was neuroborreliosis late-stage Lyme disease which has spread to the central nervous system.

As a physician trained at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Miller reached out to his colleagues there and asked that they look at the possibility that she might have Lyme. However, her ELISA test came back negative, as is the case in approximately 50% of patients who actually have Lyme disease.

From there, Dr. Miller did what many physicians experienced in Lyme disease do. He sent her blood to a specialty lab that reports all the bands on the Western blot. Lo and behold, her test came back positive for Lyme.

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Bart Yasso was never more himself than when he was on a long run. As the chief running officer of Runners World magazine, he generally logged about 80 miles per week. He regularly trained for marathons and had finished two Ironmans, taking comfort in the distances he traveled. That all changed one cool April day in 1990.

I went through a series of doctors, and no one could figure out why I was just not feeling well, Yasso recalls. Id try to run every once in a while, but it was awful.

Must Watch Lyme Disease Video By Dr Al Miller

Dr. Al Miller talks about his changing views on Chronic Lyme disease as he watched his daughter in law suffer from it. He talks about the inaccurate Lyme disease tests along with how Lyme may bring out different symptoms, including psychiatric, in different people.

Learn more about:

• Why Lyme tests are inaccurate
• Which Lyme specific bands 31 & 34 were removed from most western blot tests.
• What kind of symptoms different people will get with Lyme disease.
• What indeterminate tests mean on the Western Blot.
• How to get a more accurate Lyme test.
• Which lab tests he likes.
• The difference between acute and chronic Lyme disease
• Co infections
• Is ALS, MS and Alzheimer Disease really Lyme disease?
• People with neurological diseases all need to be tested for Lyme disease properly.

Also Check: What Symptoms Does Lyme Disease Cause

Thoughts On Must Watch Lyme Disease Video By Dr Al Miller

Study Design And Patient Sample

This retrospective observational study was performed in a single center, an outpatient suburban infectious diseases clinic of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine located in Lutherville, Maryland. Patient charts were screened for a presumptive diagnosis of Lyme disease and for referral to rule out Lyme disease between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2013. Persons younger than 12 years old were excluded, as the clinic did not treat children below this age. The anonymized data set was compiled by 4 medical research assistants and subsequently reviewed independently by 2 infectious diseases physicians for accuracy of information and diagnoses. A standardized list of symptoms, physical examination findings, and laboratory data was used for clinical data extraction for every patient record. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Data on other infections previously diagnosed or treated in conjunction with Lyme disease were tabulated. These infections included other Ixodes-transmitted infections , infections transmitted by other tick species , other infections not transmitted by ticks , and problems characterized as due to an infection . Non-tick-borne infections were included if they were believed to occur contemporaneously with the patients Lyme disease.

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Predictors For Patients Without Current Lyme Disease

Multivariable logistic regression analysis yielded the following independent predictors for patients without current Lyme disease : female gender , symptom duration > 3 months , higher number of symptoms , greater number of Lyme disease laboratory tests , and reported history of coinfections . When further examined, symptom duration showed a direct correlation with the likelihood of patients not having current Lyme disease in the multivariable model. Our model estimated that in those with symptom duration from 3 to 6 months, the likelihood of not having current Lyme disease was 2.3 times higher than for similar patients with a symptom duration of 03 months , and the likelihood of not having current Lyme disease was 6.0 times higher when comparing those with a symptom duration > 6 months to the 36-month group . Only joint swelling was associated with active/recent Lyme disease . Although univariate analysis demonstrated that an antimicrobial treatment duration of more than 3 months was associated with patients without current Lyme disease, it was not statistically significant in the multivariable model .

Of the 911 patients without current Lyme disease, alternative diagnoses were made by the infectious diseases clinicians for 607 patients .

Mysterious Illness From The 70s

Dr. Miller practiced internal medicine and rheumatology for 40 years, and taught at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

He first learned about Lyme disease at a medical conference in 1977, when he heard Dr. Allan Steere describe an epidemic of arthritis-like symptoms in children near Lyme, Connecticut. Five years later, Dr. Wilhelm Burgdorfer would identify a tick-borne species of Borrelia as the causative agent of what came to be known as Lyme disease.

Years later, Lyme disease would tragically affect a member of Dr. Millers own family.

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What People Are Reading

Their rapid spread is largely due to warmer and longer springs, summers, and autumns. Warm days allow the insects to reproduce more quickly and rapidly boost their population, explained Nicholas Ogden, senior research scientist at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Migratory birds arriving in Canada from the U.S. also act like a conveyor belt, bringing the bugs north from areas where they have long been common.

Climate change is warming Canada about twice as fast as the global average, and the provinces with Lyme-bearing ticks have seen their average annual temperatures increase by roughly 1.3 C, according to a 2019 report by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

It seems that the warming has allowed more of Canada to become a zone in which ticks can complete their life cycle, Ogden said. Moreover, forest cover has increased in tick-prone areas since the 1950s as the number of farms has decreased and agricultural land has gone fallow, bolstering tick habitat.

Added to this population explosion is the prevalence of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, which accumulates in rodents and birds before infecting ticks and humans. For instance, in some parts of the U.S., roughly 70 per cent of ticks carry the microbe, significantly increasing the risk of exposure to people, he explained.

A False Chronic Lyme Diagnosis Leaves Depression Untreated

In 2012, science journalist Laura Helmuth, PhD wrote about Lyme disease conspiracy theories promoted by politicians such as Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Governor Bob McDonnell.

Ironically, years later, a believer in chronic Lyme disease Al Miller tried to recruit Ann and Mitt Romney into the cult of chronic Lyme by suggesting Anns multiple sclerosis was really Lyme disease.

Alfred Miller is a retired medical doctor whose daughter-in-law tragically died of ALS . He is convinced that Lyme disease caused her ALS even though there is no connection between ALS and Lyme disease.

Recommended Reading: Getting Tested For Lyme Disease

Lyme Sci: Is It Fibromyalgiaor Lyme Disease

When Lady Gaga recently revealed a diagnosis of fibromyalgiaa set of symptoms characterized by widespread pain that is frequently accompanied by fatigue, sleep disturbances, memory issues and mood changesI thought of another famous singer, Kris Kristofferson.

The Country Music Hall of Famer was also initially told he had fibromyalgia. As his symptoms worsened over the next 12 years, however, Kristofferson was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimersuntil he was later found to actually have late-stage Lyme disease.

Like others in the Lyme community, I couldnt help wondering if Lady Gaga actually has Lyme disease. It turns out that Alfred Miller, MD, a retired doctor from San Antonio, Texas, has the exact same suspicion.

A Murine Model Of Lyme Disease Demonstrates That Borrelia Burgdorferi Colonizes The Dura Mater And Induces Inflammation In The Central Nervous System

• * E-mail:

  Affiliation Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of North Dakota, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States of America

• Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing review & editing

  Current address: BioLegend, San Diego, California, United States of America

  Affiliation Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of North Dakota, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States of America

• Emilie E. Vomhof-DeKrey,

  Roles Investigation, Methodology

  Affiliations Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of North Dakota, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States of America, Department of Surgery, University of North Dakota, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States of America

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On People Falsely Diagnosed With Chronic Lyme Disease:

Their symptoms are real, and they deserve help. But giving them a phantom diagnosis and making them part of a crusade to bring truth to medicine just perpetuates the idea that the symptoms they describe must be part of a complex, classic disease. Its much more likely to be depression, and depression is treatable.

As the CDC gently points out, mentioning other diagnoses that have been favorite catch-alls, Your doctor may want to treat you in ways similar to patients who have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. This does not mean that your doctor is dismissing your pain or saying that you have these conditions. It simply means that the doctor is trying to help you cope with your symptoms using the best tools available.

The full article is worth reading: Why Is Romney Campaigning on Medical Quackery?

See also:

• Jennifer Hollis was treating a fake diagnosis with bleach rather than getting help for her depression. She took her own life.

Nightside A New Perspective On Lyme Disease

BOSTON Dr. Alfred Miller is a Mayo Clinic trained physician with four decades of experience running a private practice. He believes that there may be a connection between Lyme Disease, ALS, and MS. Tonight, he joins Dan in studio to talk about his research and take some listener calls. Tune in to hear his perspective and find out about some of the cases hes seen.

**Comment**

Great interview. Dr. Miller points out the insensitivity of current CDC 2-tier testing, the fact many patients with autoimmune diseases have undiagnosed Lyme, that other insects carry borrelia, the causative agent of LD, and the importance of going off immunosuppressive drugs for at least a month, taking at least 21 days of doxycycline to evoke an immune response, and then taking a Lyme test.

A word of caution: while some LLMDs use the CD-57, others do not.

It is important to remember that the CD57 result is just a number far more important is the patients clinical status. An old professor of mine used to say, treat the patient, not the lab test! There is still much we do not know about the CD57 marker and what other factors may lower or raise it.

He also recommends the IgeneX test.

Also, consider these coinfection checklists:

More on Dr. Miller:

Contact Dr. Miller:

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