False Negatives in Lyme Tests: What You Need to Know

Do you have long-term Lyme disease? I'm Dr. Diane Mueller, Lyme and mold illness expert. This is what we're talking about today. So long-term Lyme disease is possible even if you do not remember a tick bite, even if you never had a diagnosed short-term Lyme disease. Long-term Lyme disease is a great mimicker because of its ability to attack the heart, to attack the nerves, to disrupt our immune system. And because our nerves, our circulation, and our immune system run throughout the whole body, the system— the symptoms are widespread. Symptoms could be brain fog or chronic fatigue or things like— let's just think of like your average pharmaceutical commercial, right? And like the long list of side effects, that's basically Lyme disease. It can cause such a wide variety of things. So how do you know if you have long-term Lyme disease? Well, you definitely want to test for it. You want to test for it with a Lyme literate doc. Because the tests on the market, some of the tests on the market, have been shown to have just over a 70%, about a 73.6% chance of a false negative. That is horrible. Why are we using tests like that at all? I have no idea, but that's the truth of the matter. So you really want to find a Lyme literate doc that can run the proper tests. And the time to think about running proper tests for these long symptoms, right, these potential symptoms that could be Lyme, is really if you have any conglomeration of symptoms that is not, say, a standard thing, right? So if you have chronic fatigue syndrome and you test your thyroid and your thyroid's low and, you know, you take thyroid, you feel better, well, it's probably not Lyme disease. But if you have like a combination of symptoms, right, where it's like maybe you have fatigue and you have a headache and you have joint pain, right? So when you get these combinations of symptoms affecting places around the body all at one time, That's a really great, great indicator that Lyme is possible. Remember, Lyme is not the only thing that can cause this mass conglomeration of symptoms. Obviously, our diet can, food reactions can, things like mold toxicity, toxic metals, lifestyle choices. So there's many different things that can contribute to this. For people in my practice, I've been in practice for just under 15 years now, and people in my practice, I've never seen a case yet. Where there's only one root cause, right? So if you have all these symptoms and you have Lyme disease, you probably have Lyme and, and, and, and, and, right? Because usually that's how it is in chronic illness. But if you have this widespread, these widespread chronic symptoms that make maybe no sense to you, why the headache and the joint pain would go together, why the headache and the fatigue and the thyroid issue would go together, right? If you're like, oh, there's so many different symptoms, it just feels like my laundry list of symptoms is just getting really long. Right? If that's happening, that's a real good time to advocate to get a good lab test done. You might need to see a Lyme literate doc because a lot of the conventional docs are just not educated in this area. It's not their area of expertise, so they might not order the, the right lab that you need. So make sure you advocate for yourself. Don't get the standard panels, get something better. I use a company called Vibrant Wellness for this. Igenex is a great company. DNA Connections is a great company. There's several other others out there. So there are good companies that test for this. So I hope this has been helpful. Please do share this information with a friend and family member, and I hope to see you soon.