Tom Fox welcomes back Scott Endicott and Ben Locwin to part 3 of the Understanding Lyme Disease Podcast Series. In this episode, they look at treatment solutions for Lyme disease.
The Current Lyme Treatment
The current treatment for Lyme disease is more focused on adults. It’s a non innovative approach, however, as Ben points out. The current standard treatment is a 100 milligram dosage of Doxycycline twice per day for 10 to 12 days. Patients will typically get three weeks worth of prescription. For children, they are prescribed Amoxicillin as they can’t tolerate Doxycycline. This dosage would be 50 milligrams, three times a day. The current treatment protocols are inadequate for the population who have Lyme disease symptoms, Ben tells Tom. Both the infectious disease community and the academic research and physician community are holding fast to their own views on how Lyme disease is to be treated and what works and what doesn’t. This poses a challenge, Scott remarks.
The Need For Innovation
“The Health and Human Services (HHS) just put together a working group that is actually looking at emergent innovative approaches, and some of those innovative approaches are ones that the Lyme specialists have been using for many years, like PICC lyme antibiotics, essentially intravenous antibiotics in order to arrest very accelerated symptoms and symptoms that have taken patients to a place where there needs to be massive changes to their health or things are going to continue… to just get worse,” he adds. This kind of innovation needs to be more normalized, and clinical experts need to remove themselves from their old school way of thinking. When new data is coming in from patient case reports, experts should be able to build new hypotheses, Scott and Ben argue. They shouldn’t have such an emotional conviction to past beliefs that they can’t be moved by new data. Innovating patient care and treatment is to understand exactly what is clear within the data, and for what isn’t clear, to make adjustments.
The Next Step
Research and medication needs to adapt. What was believed to be effective in the past is no longer so in the present. “Frankly in clinical medicine, the endpoints to show that something is efficacious are either to demonstrate improvements and how a patient feels or functions or survives,” Scott says. Measuring survivability is important but if patients are presenting that they don’t feel well, or aren’t functioning the same, and medical experts turn a blind eye to that, then there will be no innovation in terms of truly tackling the disease. The next step for treatment would be diagnostic testing that gets much closer, and that which puts data back into the hands of clinicians, so they can advise patients properly and with better protocols.
Resources
Scott Endicott | LinkedIn
Ben Locwin | LinkedIn | Twitter
