These antigens are so immuno-reactive that they were the antigens chosen for human vaccine trials. Yet they are not considered important enough to include in the diagnostic criteria. T his abstract showed that, under the old criteria, all of 66 pediatric patients with a history of a tick bite and Bull's Eye rash who were symptomatic were accepted as positive under the old Western Blot interpretation. Under the newly proposed criteria, only 20 were now considered positive. This is not true.
False positives are rare.
No matter how bad the tests are, as long as we have them doctors will use them. There is a persistent dogma in medicine that 28 days of IV antibiotics cures all Lyme Disease. This was because doctors put too much faith in IV antibiotics as being so powerful, that they did not follow up IV's with oral antibiotics. The key to treating late Lyme appears to be the length of antibiotic treatment, not the method. I have included in the references several published studies, case histories and abstracts that deal with culture positive patients who had been previously treated aggressively with antibiotics, often including intravenous antibiotics.