Spirochetal Infections

Spirochetal infection symptoms include

• Muscle pain
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Abdominal pain

Common types of infections

• The two most common: Lyme disease and syphilis
• Both are great masqueraders in terms of symptoms
• They can cause and they can mimic other conditions and throw people off

Lyme disease history

• The first discoveries in Lyme disease were in a rheumatologic setting
• All of a sudden people were having meningitis and radiculitis and even cardiac heart block and other conditions; Bell’s palsy was a common presentation. These were associated with the Lyme spirochete
• It became clear that Lyme actually invaded the nervous system early and was more of a neurological disorder or it was more prominently a neurological disorder than a rheumatological disorder
• If you don’t check, you don’t know
• If a person doesn’t present in a characteristic way, they may not be screened, or the assay that was used may not have been appropriate
• We commonly see people who have gone untreated still

Post Lyme disease

• An interesting and tragic phenomenon: people who are seemingly appropriately treated with antibiotics continue to have symptoms that seem to be referable to their original Lyme infection but they’re not associated with active Lyme
• There’s a controversy over what’s fueling it; patients are not necessarily responsive to additional antibiotics and there’s some interesting ideas about immune system activation and how that may play a role