alt Hacker NewsPublicly founded health systems are terrible whe. dealing with Lyme disease. It is impossible to simply and clearly diagnose, and separate ill people from "simulants". Something like "back pain" ormother chronic illnesses.
Publicly founded health systems are terrible whe. dealing with Lyme disease. It is impossible to simply and clearly diagnose, and separate ill people from "simulants". Something like "back pain" ormother chronic illnesses.
Nothing really to do with public healthcare. It is literally that there is almost no medical or social experience in the UK of actually seeing developed Lyme disease up close, because it has historically been so unusual, so there are no protocols.
A few thousand cases every year now, when the first indigenous case ever properly recorded in the UK was only in 1986, and it's not like in the USA where really wide areas are high risk. Some of the pockets of highest risk Lyme in the UK are no more than a few miles across.
Nurse stations and pharmacy clinics are great at properly removing ticks if you know you have been bitten, and from there you will now get good advice about Lyme.
But a system that has no endemic experience of Lyme is just not going to test for it. Because it's remote, and people are usually unaware they have been in risk areas, and often unaware they've even been bitten.