I have had some things occurring in past couple years (not counting accident
problems) which has caused several doctors to ask me if I had or been tested
for Lime Disease and/or Lupus. I know from tv that Lime comes from ticks
which I have had hundreds of babies bite me when I was small from hunting and
camping, etc…and i heard somewhere that lupus has a brown patch, which I
have a pale one on cheek, but what exactly are problems that would make a
doctor ask that and for more than one doctor to make comments that these two
things could explain some of my problems … what exactly are these
diseases/medical problems, and what are the symptoms? Hopefully I don’t have
these, and they won’t test now since concentrating on getting me stronger and
stop passing out, so they are testing more for this accident-related stuff,
but I am curious.
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Uucp: …{gatech,ames,rutgers}!ncar!asuvax!stjhmc!110!230!Judith.Murphy
Internet: Judith.Mur…@f230.n110.z1.fidonet.org
In article <28764.271F0…@stjhmc.fidonet.org> Judith.Mur…@f230.n110.z1.fidonet.org (Judith Murphy) writes:
>I have had some things occurring in past couple years (not counting accident
>problems) which has caused several doctors to ask me if I had or been tested
>for Lime Disease and/or Lupus.
>… what exactly are problems that would make a
>doctor ask that and for more than one doctor to make comments that these two
>things could explain some of my problems … what exactly are these
>diseases/medical problems, and what are the symptoms?
Of course it would be nearly impossible to answer the first question unless
one were a psychic and the answer to the second would be, more appropriately,
found in something like the AMA’s home health book. But to give you a general
answer, clusters of constitutional signs and symptoms (fatigue, fevers,
rashes, joint pains, etc.), are commonly encountered in clinical practice and
often very difficult to diagnose perhaps, in part, because there exists only
the history and the patient’s complaints. When an obvious cause cannot be
found, the physician turns to ruling out those causes which, however unlikely,
may be treatable. Among those are the rhematologic disorders, the inflammatory
diseases, certain chronic infections, environmental factors, and others.
Frequently, clinical suspicion may be so low as to call into question whether
the cost of the test is justified by the level of concern. This would be
expecially true if the patient had recently been tested for one or more of
the diseases in question and the results of that testing known. In other
words, if you *had* tested positive for Lyme disease it might explain whatever
is going on, now.
This kind of behavior is a variation of Holmes’ Law, "When all other
possibilities have been eliminated, that which remains, however unlikely,
must be the answer." It’s also called the "process of elimination."
Your question, however, underscores a more serious concern. These questions
which you are posing to the net should have been posed to your physician.
As the person who is most intimately familiar with your case, they are best
able to explain what is their thinking and you should really be discussing
this with that clinician. No piece of information that you get, here, should
be as valuable as the results of the same discussion with your clinician and
I would urge you talk this out with them. (I wouldn’t even take my *own*
advice on this group unless I knew me pretty well
In the meantime, check out the AMA book. I’m certainly not endorsing anything
that the AMA does and I have no association with them or this book but I have
scanned it and it does contain a reasonable amount of information geared toward
the non-clinical reader. Let me caution you that something like this should be
a starting point for your clinical education and not the last word on what is
good medical practice. But it is a reasonable first introduction to medicine.
Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh