Various symptoms of Lyme disease appear differently depending on the stage the disease has entered. To effectively treat Lyme disease you should identify the stage of the disease to be able to diagnose and administer the right treatment correctly. The treatment will start in the early stages of Lyme disease which can cure the disease completely. If the treatment was never started early enough, the doctor should start late-stage treatment.
Diagnosis and treatment of early-stage Lyme disease
The early stage of Lyme disease takes place from the tick bite and can take up to thirty days. It is characterized by the skin rash around the tick bite with flu-like symptoms. The redness of the skin starts to appear and increase intensity as days go by. If the rash doesn’t appear the lab test should confirm the presence of bacteria in your bloodstream. To treat the early stages of Lyme disease, the victim should start taking oral antibiotics. Most people who start antibiotics early heals completely.
Treatment of late-stage Lyme disease
The treatment of the late stage of Lyme disease is however different because the disease has started affecting your nervous systems and spread to the heart. To treat Lyme disease at this stage, the antibiotics are administered directly into the veins (IV) in order to go directly into your bloodstream and start working immediately. The antibiotics are administered continuously for two to three weeks. The side effects of IV is that you may experience diarrhea and low white blood cells counts which lead to weak immunity. The doctor will prescribe extra drugs to cab the side effects and improve your conditions.
Sometimes the symptoms may not go away even after treating using IV, and this situation is called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome or Chronic Lyme disease. The cause of this condition is not clear. Some doctors believe that it could be as a result of the damages the antibiotics may have done on other tissues and immunity system in general. Others believe that bacteria which resist treatments could cause it.
Treating this condition with more antibiotics may cause more harm than good. Therefore your doctor may prescribe other treatment of the symptoms at hand. If the patient is still having symptoms like fatigue and headache, the doctor prescribes drugs to heal these particular symptoms.
Reference
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lyme-disease/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20374655
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