My first post on here and it's OT but this is important. Lyme can be very debilitating if left untreated. My daughter missed high school because Lyme took her down. She was so cognitively disabled that she lost the ability to read for three years. She was the top student in her class a in 8th grade and a top soccer player but then was out of school for five years. Couldn't be tutored for most of it because she was so impaired. She never got a chance to play the sport she loved or reap the rewards that come to a top student athlete (she had hoped to play D1 college) Finally in the fifth year of treatment started to improve, took SATs, got a GED and went off to college and did very well. She had both Lyme and something called Bartonella, which is just as debilitating as Lyme. Ticks carry several pathogens and often people end up with Lyme plus multiple coinfections, all of which respond to different antibiotics. So it is important to identify what infections you have. As a result of my daughter and all i learned in the process, i became a Lyme patient advocate 13 years ago, started a support group in Southbury that is still going, then moved to New Hampshire six years ago, started a group up here that now has over 600 members. There is so much misinformation out there about Lyme. If caught early and treated properly it usually is no problem. However, if not diagnosed and treated in the acute stage, it can become a physical and neurological nightmare. Unfortunately, the medical establishment is not very well informed and has a very narrow and wrong-headed view of Lyme and knows too little about the coinfections. As a result, many people are being misdiagnosed and undertreated and ending up very debilitated. Late stage Lyme is often misdiagnosed a MS, Parkinson's, ALS, Lupus, bipolar disease, chronic migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, autism, etc. The politics surrounding Lyme are fierce. The chances of getting properly treated at your pcp are between slim and none. The two pill prophylactic that the establishment recommends for a tick bite has proven highly ineffective, causing a lot of people to end up with chronic Lyme. The establishment protocol for Lyme is Doxycycline 100mg 2x/day for 10 -28 days, typically 3 weeks. The Lyme literate doctors prescribe Doxycycline 200mg 2x/day for a minimum of 28 days. This is for acute Lyme or even to treat a bite prophylactically. They found that too many patients were ending up with chronic Lyme on the lower dose. The chronic form of Lyme can be life-altering and difficult to resolve so best to treat aggressively during that window when you have the best chance to eradicate it. The establishment doesn't believe there is any such thing as chronic, persistent Lyme so they don't believe antibiotics beyond four weeks is worthwhile or effective. There should be no debate but there is. These bacteria have all kinds of ability to evade treatment and survive. Obviously, lots of people get bit and don't end up debilitated. There are over 100 strains of the Borrelia bacteria that causes Lyme and only some of those strains are highly virulent. But too often, people end up with neurodegenerative diseases or neuropsychiatric diseases as a result of a tick bite and go from specialist to specialist without any of them even considering the possibility that it all the result of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. There are no more than a handful of Lyme literate doctors in each state that really understand Lyme and the establishment treats them as pariahs even though they are very fine doctors. They are putting their necks on the line for patients and have their eyes and minds open rather than buying into the mythical Infectious Disease Society of America Lyme guidelines that most of the establishment follows. By the way, the establishment considers rheumatologists and infectious disease doctors to be Lyme specialists but most are far from it. I give a lot of talks up here in NH and I usually tell people that rheumatologists and infectious disease docs are more responsible than all other specialties for misdiagnosis of Lyme.
Sorry about the lengthy OT post, just want to forewarn people to take Lyme seriously and to understand how little understanding your doctors have regarding Lyme.
As for treating the ticks, one inexpensive approach would be to treat your lawn and the periphery with food grade diatomaceous earth. You can get it at Agway and because it is food grade it is non-toxic and won't hurt your well water. Otherwise, the pest control and lawn services do a pretty good job applying 3 or 4 treatments a year. Some do have natural products that are supposed to be safe. Ticks like shade so the worst areas of your yard are the areas of brush, leaves, ground cover, shrubs and tall grass. The more you clean up those areas and provide a boundary of stone or wood chips between the lawn and the periphery the better. Best to put the kids swing sets out in the sun rather than in the shady corner of the yard as people typically do. And do thorough tick checks when coming in from outside. We call the tick "nature's dirty needle. It requires a blood meal at each of its three life stages, larva, nymph and adult. In its early stages it feeds on the whit footed mouse, chipmunks, squirrels, possums, raccoons, etc and these can and do pass along all kinds of pathogens including Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia (malaria-like parasite that is a common coinfection), ehrlichia, anaplasmosis, powassan virus, etc). Our vets are seeing all of these in our pets. Unfortunately, our docs have been slow to recognize and understand these. We joke about going to the vet to get proper treatment.
Sorry to start off with such a lengthy, off-topic post but Dove's inquiry prompted me to sign up after years of "lurking". Just trying to help people avoid the horror show that we went through. I'm a long-time Husky fan going back to the days of Toby and Wes, when as a kid I would listen to them on the radio, not always easy because of the poor transmission in those days. We've come a long way, but those teams were a lot of fun too.
