Mass General article on chronic Lyme

A long piece, 5 pages, on Lyme. 

proto MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
                              DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF MEDICINE

When Lyme Lingers

BY DAVID HOWARD // SPRING 2014

THE DIFFICULT PROBLEM OF ONE IN 10 CASES OF LYME DISEASE:
Is it co-infection? // Or factors unique to the patient? // Or bacteria-evading antibiotics? // Or are there other reasons why it won't go away?

http://protomag.com/assets/lingering-lyme-disease?page=1

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The idea that he might have Lyme disease never crossed Ethan Robert's mind. His symptoms began in 2009 with pain in a sciatic nerve that ran down his left leg. After a month the pain went away, but the following year his shoulders and elbows hurt, and the pain migrated to different joints in his arms for about 18 months. Robert, who lives in Boston, wrote that off to overexertion at the gym.

Pain later flared in his hip and his jaw, and by last summer, he had developed marked swelling and pain in both knees and an ankle—four years after his ordeal began. When that siege of arthritis finally prevented him from walking to work, he called his doctor, who referred him to the rheumatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. Robert wound up seeing Allen Steere, the researcher who produced the first conclusive account of Lyme disease in 1977 and is now lead investigator of the illness at the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases at MGH.

.....read the rest of the article...

http://protomag.com/assets/lingering-lyme-disease?page=1