alfreda89 | Turns out a phone call was made to my specialist over the prez's Lyme disease....

Small insect carries debilitating disease

"GLENCOE - When Dr. Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco physician known for treating patients with Lyme disease, received a call from a Washington, D.C., doctor last summer, he became nervous.

Stricker said the caller, whom he did not know personally and whom Stricker did not identify, asked him lots of questions about treating Lyme disease, a potentially debilitating bacterial infection transmitted by tick bites.

"It was such an odd phone call," Stricker said. "I was actually a little paranoid."

Stricker is president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which believes Lyme patients sometimes need longer, more expensive treatments with antibiotics than are called for by the guidelines that most U.S. medical organizations follow. Some doctors have been disciplined by state medical boards for giving the longer treatments.

Stricker said the call made sense a year later, when news broke that President Bush in summer 2006 had been treated for Lyme disease and that his physicians deemed him cured when Bush got his annual physical last month.

Stricker said he finds it suspicious that the president's physicians released fairly detailed accounts of the growths in the president's colon but did not say exactly how he was treated for Lyme disease, sidestepping what has become a medical battlefield."

http://recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070902/A_NEWS/709020321