No worries, Confused!! We have all had to learn things in order to be active on this forum!! considering how much brain fog some of us have, it's a wonder we can learn this at all!! LOL!! I thought I was
never going to learn how to post when I was new!! LOL! Every time I had to relearn it!
After this many posts though, I think I have the hang of it now!!
Giggle!
Most people just assume that the main stream medical will have all the answers, as a matter of fact, most of us thought so too! We were all kind of shocked when we were tossed aside once we didn't fit into any easy diagnosis or didn't respond to treatment "like we should". Treatment of these diseases are
very controversial still - think of the AIDS epidemic and how hard they had to fight to get a standard of treatment going, and I believe that's what will have to happen for us as well.Until then, we do have each other and a few doc's that agree with us!
There's always a remote possibility that you could come across an ID doc that will actually treat you properly, but it's not worth the hunt as far as I'm concerned. We are quite ill, and the last thing we need to be doing is fighting for appropriate treatment. That's why we just suggest that members use ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) trained Lyme Literate doctors - even then you can end up with a doc that won't treat you properly.
I would venture to guess that you will be sorely disappointed with your appt at Emory. I believe you will have an appt with an Infectious Disease doc, and they are notorious for not believing that anything beyond 2 weeks of abx will make a difference - even though there is a ton of scientific evidence that says it does make a difference! They believe that Lyme is hard to get and very easy to treat with a short course of abx. We have a number of members here that have found us because they had seen an ID doc and weren't cured at all.
Chances are that you won't get anywhere with calling the ID doc and asking if you could get a Western Blot either. As I said though, since you tested positive on the least sensitive test known (the ELISA), you would test positive on the Western Blot as well. I would wait until you find a LLMD and see what s/he wants to do. The really good LLMD's will diagnose you by symptoms anyway, as they understand how inaccurate the tests are. If you would like I can go into why the tests are so inaccurate, otherwise, there's no use in my confusing the matter!! LOL!
Many well respected LLMD's will have their patients take a few weeks of appropriate abx treatment and then have them do the Western Blot. That means that you would have to have 400 - 600 mgs of Doxy a day though.
Keep on asking those questions!! That's how we learn, that and reading, just be sure that what you are reading are actually based on science - not just what people are talking about
, as there is a lot of misguided people out there that are just desperate for something, anything that might help. It's very unfortunate that they are often lead astray to try things that don't actually help cure their disease.