Looking for LLMD/LLND in the Los Angeles area.

Hi SmilinSam,
Have you gotten any responses yet? If not, please email me and I'll share the ones I have in your area - please be sure to include the area that you are hoping to find a LLMD in for me!!

Hi jd1984 - welcome to our community!

Sorry for the reason you are here, but I'm glad you found us. Great group of people here - knowledgeable and supportive.

Since you are new to the forum, I'd like to point out the thread at the top of the page titled: "New to Lyme?..Start Here!" - full of great information - symptom lists, detoxing suggestions, info on probiotics, and more.

In addition to getting recommendations from members, you can also contact the ILADS Physician Referral - here's the link:

ilads.org/ilads_media/physician-referral/

@cccmamma Saw you online I was reading on a post about Lyme literate doctors that take insurance and somebody said they emailed you with two in LA to take insurance could you be so kind and send me their names? I could really use them thank you so much.

Post Edited By Moderator (Girlie) : 1/23/2016 10:17:23 PM (GMT-7)

Hello, looking for a good LLMd who takes insurance in the Los Angeles area.

Thank you!

Thanks for the quick response! Do I just need to make my email public? Or is there something else I missing?

Girlie said...
Hi Lizmcalevey - welcome to our community!

I am sorry you need to see a LLMD, but am glad that you have found us here.
This is a great community of like-minded people - lots of support and knowledge here.


I'd like to ask you to enable your email option so members can send you names privately. We don't post the LLMD names on here for privacy reasons.

Because you are new here, it would be helpful if you read through the thread at the top of the page titled: "New to Lyme?..Start Here!" It's full of great information -symptom lists, info on probiotics, detoxing ideas, and much more.

Good luck!

cccmama3000 said...
I know of 2 LLMDs in LA who do take insurance. I just emailed you.

@cjustine

Hi! IF you have any good info on any LLMDsin LA that take insurance could you please email me the info?

Also wanted to let you know that in addition to getting forum members recommendations, you can also contact ILADS Physician referral for some LLMD names.
Here is the link:

ilads.org/ilads_media/physician-referral/

Hello all - I'm writing on behalf of a friend of mine who is seriously ill. She is looking for a doctor in the LA area who is open-minded about treating infectious diseases, and she's wondering if a Lyme literate doctor might be a good choice.

Her story requires a little explanation -- a big thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this. I myself was sick for over a year with a still-unidentified tick-borne illness that also left me with the "alpha-gal" food allergy, so I have so much sympathy for everyone who is struggling with ticks and their diseases.

So, for 9 months my friend has been struggling with severe stomach pain that gets worse every time she eats. She also has a tender spot in her upper left abdomen. No other symptoms, other than a few weeks of severe shortness of breath. At first it seemed like a simple case of H. pylori. She took the antibiotic cocktail for it and improved dramatically, but slowly the pain started coming back after several weeks.

Her follow-up H. pylori test was negative, and a basic stool screen for pathogens and parasites was negative, so every GI doc she has seen has insisted the problem can't be bacterial. They have run every other test they can think of and turned up nothing. They've had her take drugs for GERD and for neuropathic pain and for who knows what else, with no effect. She finally found a doctor who would let her try the H. pylori cocktail again, and again it produced a dramatic improvement for several weeks!

But the doctors still say it "can't be bacterial", so they won't try further antibiotics, they won't do more testing for pathogens (she hasn't been tested for Lyme yet), and they won't refer her to an infectious disease specialist (and *they* won't take new patients without referrals).

She's got the names of 4 ILADS doctors, but they all seem to favor alternative therapies, which my friend is uncomfortable with. She's worried that she'll be pushed into more treatments that she doesn't agree with, just like with all the other docs she's seen so far.

So I would love to hear any suggestions for SoCal docs who might be able to help her, and it would be especially helpful to hear if the docs would be respectful and understanding with a patient who wants to focus on conventional therapies first. Thank you so much.

Hi Girlie! No, she's never had any Lyme testing done, and her current doctors won't authorize any further testing for pathogens. I will definitely point her to the symptom checklist.

When I said the docs favor alternative therapies, I mean that they offer them as a major part of their practices. Not to get too far afield here, but my friend had some very bad experiences as a child with her parents forcing her into inappropriate alternative therapies, and so she's very wary of anyone who's part of that scene at all. (That's part of why it's been so crushing for her to be dismissed and steam-rollered by so many conventional docs this past year, because up till now they've been people she felt she could trust.) For that reason, she's been hesitant to contact any of the ILADS doctors yet. It will be very reassuring to her to hear that even the MDs who do offer complementary therapies like herbs and homeopathy still prioritize the antibiotics.

As to whether I'm in remission... that's a really good question. I've just been diagnosed with sleep apnea, so we'll see if treatment for that deals with my remaining fatigue and pain and brain fog.

When I first got sick, one of my kids had "fifth disease" (parvovirus b19), so I assumed at first that that was what I had, because it can cause fairly severe illness in adults, with long term joint pain (and it's one of the common triggers for chronic fatigue syndrome). But just a month later, I started having the first symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as alpha-galactose allergy, which is a tick-borne allergy to mammal-derived foods (red meat and dairy). (Incidentally, would your community members be interested in a post about alpha-gal? It's a bizarre and complicated allergy that is very hard to get diagnosed outside of a few hot-spots in the Southeast.)

Anyway, the area I live in is crawling with lone star ticks, as well as other varieties, and I was probably getting 5-10 tick bites a year back then (I'm much more careful now). So it's possible that the illness and the allergy were two separate horrible problems that just coincidentally happened in the same month, but my current doc thinks it's likely that they were both triggered by the same tick bite. I test negative for Lyme and RMSF, and we haven't tested for others yet given that my symptoms have improved a lot. (I did NOT have good medical care at the time I got sick, but now I do have a good team.)

For months, I had severe fatigue, a sore throat, joint pain in my hands, wrists, feet and ankles, and burning pain in a line on each side of my spine. There was a weird relapsing pattern to it -- I would feel horrible for 5-7 days, then better for 2-3, then it would wallop me again.

Very slowly, the time between episodes started increasing. Eventually I stopped getting the joint pain in my limbs. The last time I had the burning spinal pain was 10 months ago, and the sore throat is finally clearing up (I just finished a 2-month course of Chinese herbs, which I think helped a lot with that). So now, three years after first getting sick, I'm just left with fatigue, general body aches, and trouble concentrating, which could all be due to the sleep apnea, so I guess we'll see what happens!

Hi there can you email me the list of llmds you know of in LA that take insurance? Recently diagnosed.

cccmama3000 said...
I know of 2 LLMDs in LA who do take insurance. I just emailed you.