Dr. Diane Mueller explains why Lyme disease might trigger a positive syphilis test. Studies suggest it's possible but not proven. Since untreated syphilis causes severe neurological damage, she recommends treating positive results as syphilis or retesting after 60 days, with close physician follow-up.
Hi everybody. Dr. Diane, your Lyme and mold expert talking about can syphilis mimic Lyme? So what I see when I look at studies on this question of if somebody has a positive syphilis test, can Lyme actually be causing that? It really looks like it's possible, right? It's not 100% for sure like anything in medicine, but it really looks like it's possible. Now that being said, syphilis left untreated can cause severe neurological problems. So while if you have Lyme and you also get an STI test and syphilis comes up, while this might not actually be syphilis, right. While it might be Lyme possibly and it's causing some of these titers, you really want to take this very, very seriously because of the long term ramifications of syphilis. So I definitely recommend that if you have syphilis coming up positive, you still treat it like it is syphilis, even though it may or may not be. It's just not worth taking that chance, right? Because even though, yes, there can be some miss, say false positives potentially. And again, like this is like a. I say potentially because I don't feel like with what I see, research wise, it's 100% clear. I see that some studies are like, yes, this could be happening, but it's not totally clear and perhaps somebody has Lyme and syphilis, right? There's just these unknowns. So I think it's really important to take this very seriously to avoid long term ramifications that can happen from long term syphilis, such as neurological problems and get it treated properly or, you know, at the very least wait 60 days or so and retest to see if the syphilis titers turn negative. So you could always do that if you're wanting to avoid antibiotic treatment and that sort of thing. But I would definitely just not say, oh, it's Lyme disease and let it go unchecked. I think it's very, very important to stay in connection with your doctor on this to make sure you're retesting, to make sure you really have negative titers so that, you know, if it was, you know, truly a false, false positive. Right. You really want to follow up on that? Because the last thing we want is this for, to go on for years and years and cause the neurological damage that can come from long term untreated syphilis. So just wanted to make sure to cover that on this channel. I hope this is helpful. Please do subscribe. Find information about how to work with me in my show notes. I'll see you in another video.
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