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Why not ? Lymes disease is cured by antibiotics and that is what penicilin is afterall, as far as I know there arent any resistant strains around yet. It is unlikely that the doctor will prescribe stronger synthetics such as keflex unless you have already tried penecillin as they try to keep the big gun antibiotic on close hold to prevent bugs building up resistance to them
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The bug of Lyme Disease (Borrelia burghdor feri) is not particularly sensitive to Penicillin (aka Penicillin V), any more than the bug of Tuberculosis, salmonella or most of the bugs causing uirnary tract infections are very sensitive to pencillin V.
It is responsive to the common broad spectrum penicillin, amoxicillin, if given in highish dose early in the disease.
It also depends on whether it is the spreading skin rash (erythema migrans) or an arthritis, hear or neurological problems that are being treated. There are different regimes for each - some involving intravenous high dose stuff.
The initial skin rash is the easiest to treat, but because this is an odd bug it is given for a lot longer than other antibiotics - always 10 days, and many people give for three weeks.
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you are partially correct here, the disease is transmited by the tick regurgitating infected blood from its stomach contents into you (nice), however the bite itself is not infectious so if you remove the tick quickly you lessen your chances of exposure.
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I am sorry you are not correct - I'm sure google will confirm!
What I said was
"The tick infects you by biting - it does not need to suck blood to infect you."
I am 100% confident of this statement. This is the same as in malaria, it is the saliva tranmitted by the bite that may infect you. It is said that the chances of infection are greater the longer that the tick is on the skin. I have not looked into the evidence for this statement, but it seems reasonable, for the tick, just like a mosqito, needs to continue inject small amounts of saliva which contains an anit-clotting agent/ anti-coagulant in order to be able to suck up blood - without this our bodies would cause a clot and no more blood for the blighter, but as always evolution has got the better of us!
It is claimed that regurgitated stomach contents increase the infective load - this is not proven, but sounds reasonable at first sight. I am unconvinced; It is known that the stomach fluids do contain the bug, but one could argue that once they are diluted by a large does of your uninfected blood further regurgitation of stomach contents will make little difference to the infected load of bugs getting in your system.
We simply do not know for sure - the research has not been done.
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very true , however doctors see loads of hypochondriacs on a regular basis demanding antibiotics for a range of ailments, so getting them to prescribe without a blood test is likely to be challenging (although this depends very much on your relationship with your doctor)
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Not so - doctors are very well aware that Lyme disease is around and that the consequences of untreated lyme disease can be serious with nasty neurological disease a major risk. Most will have a low level for treating this unusual disease and medical microbiologists and infectious disease specialists are at the end of a phone to advise or see if necessary.
The difference between not prescribing for a sore sore throat (which is usually viral, and even if bacterial the antibiotics only reduce the symptoms by one day) and not prescribing for a potential case of Lyme disease are worlds apart.
There is clear advice for GPs that cases should be treated on the clincial findings (spreading red rash around a bite - tick may not have been seen) because, as I stated before, blood tests are unreliable, especially early in the disease, and early treatment has better results than late treatment.
The advice is that if NO clinical features of the illness exist that antibiotics should not be given just because someone has just been bitten by a tick. Things may be a bit different in the states for a variety of reasons, mainly because the illness is much more common in certain areas.
In fact GPs don't see loadsa people with hypochondriasis who want antibiotics - they see loadsa people with various symptoms, usually including fever, who believe themselves to be ill and wonder if they have a serious bacterial illness; this is to be expected when the media hypes up everything, and in the past every fever was treated by an anti-biotic.
Hypochondriasis is somewhat different, not especially common but we won't go there!
Hobjob
(retired GP! I worked in a high red deer area for 25 years and never recognized a case of lyme disease or had any feed back that I missed any!!)
I have done a quick skim of google scholar to check some of the above
http://omni.ac.uk/browse/mesh/D008193.html http://www.oeghmp.at/eucalb/disease_overview_index.html http://www.wadhurst.demon.co.uk/lyme/