“To me, Lyme is the infectious disease equivalent of cancer. We don’t talk about cancer as just one disease anymore, and we should stop talking about Lyme this way. There are so many strains and co-infections. When you are bitten by a tick, you can get five or ten different infections at the same time.
I also find it ludicrous to call all tick-borne disease, Lyme Disease. In breast cancer, we don’t just say, ‘You have breast cancer’,”because that simply doesn’t mean anything anymore. The language is important because it has a bearing on treatment.
With cancer, we know that administering one algorithmic form of treatment doesn’t work. You have to understand the wiring that drives those tumors, the nuances, the mutations–and target them specifically. I think we need to start thinking this way about tick-borne diseases”.
-Neil L. Spector, MD. USA, Oncologist, and heart transplant recipient due to a tick bite.
