The nation's leading Lyme specialists were meeting in Boston as New England approaches its high season for the tick-borne illness. The goals of the conference included reviewing new research into chronic Lyme and spreading the word among doctors that chronic Lyme, for many, is not an imagined illness or a misdiagnosis of chronic fatigue, depression or the effects of aging. It's very real. There is something going on with these people and we need to know what it is,' said Dr. Patricia K. Coyle, a neurologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
People often get the symptoms even after what seems to be successful antibiotic treatment.
Some specialists, including Dr. Allen Steere of the New England Medical Center, who helped discover the disease in Connecticut in the 1970s, have said the disease is being overdiagnosed and confused with other ills such as chronic fatigue syndrome. There are too many of them out there who couldn't have made it all up. Dr. Brian Fallon, a Columbia University clinical psychiatrist, said brain scans on apparent chronic Lyme sufferers show, two-thirds of the time, visible abnormalities such as cerebral inflammation. Eighty percent to 90 percent of the mental function lost can be recovered with proper additional antibiotic treatment, such as tetracycline, Dr. Fallon believes.