I'm incredibly fortunate to have never had a tick bite, but my wife has and got Lyme. Don't fuck around, go get the antibiotics immediately. If your doctor doesn't believe you, write a formal complaint to their board after finding another doctor.
I did get a tick bite that I only noticed after three days. I didn't screw around and immediately went to the urgent care to get that thing removed by a professional. They also didn't wait for any kind of rash before giving me antibiotics given how long the tick was there. Lyme disease is no joke.
Ticks are incredibly common. People in my area of the country get hundreds of ticks during their life. It's also fairly rare they carry Lyme disease and gets you infected. You definitively should not be given antibiotics without a clear reason.
I'm guessing that having a tick for longer than 24 to 48 hours was a clear enough reason. I assume people who get hundreds of ticks will be checking more thoroughly and remove them within two days.
I agree antibiotics shouldn't be prescribed without a clear reason. People are being prescribed antibiotics all over for things like the common cold and for some insane reason we're still putting antibiotics in farm animal feed.
But it seems unethical to then take a gamble on whether someone contracted Lyme disease or not just to give the antibiotics we save from that gamble to someone with a runny nose. If we want to save antibiotics then we should test the removed tick for Lyme disease, not wait for symptoms to appear.
We check for ticks every day you have been in the garden or just outside in the woods. Less than 2% of ticks carry Lyme disease, and there is even less chance you actually get a infection, and that the infection becomes a permanent infection. As far as I know, Lyme disease is not that dangerous, but the bacteria can enter stasis and "hide" in different parts of your body, until it suddenly becomes active again, then really blossom if you are weakened for other reasons. The point is just that there is a less than 2% chance of even getting a tick that is a carrier, even less chance you get sick, even less chance it ends up in the dangerous stasis state. One usually does not treat for Lyme, until enough of the symptoms have started showing.
While it is good to take this stuff seriously, there's also no reason to scare people. Having lived in an area where ticks are common, I remove them weekly, if not daily, from myself and the children. There's no reason to be scared and there's certainly no reason to wait for a professional.
There's a lot of advice in the Internet why these must be removed in a special way, with a special compound, or whatever. This advice has no scientific standing. Just remove it, with your nails or a pair of tweezers, and really make sure you remove all of it.
In an area where tick borne diseases exist, be on the lookout for symptoms. Do not try to self medicate or take prophylactic antibiotics unless specifically requested by a physician or you get a rash a few days after. After all, not many ticks carry them. You are likely to be absolutely fine. Living in an area where Lyme disease is common, I've had it a few times and it is treatable with antibiotics.
There are however other diseases that aren't as easy to treat. Encephalitis for example. If you think Lyme can be nasty, that one is downright bad. Take the vaccine where it exists.
> Do not try to self medicate or take prophylactic antibiotics unless specifically requested by a physician or you get a rash a few days after.
It was requested by my physician, I did not request them nor did I insist on being prescribed anything.
> You are likely to be absolutely fine. Living in an area where Lyme disease is common, I've had it a few times and it is treatable with antibiotics.
It is still a gamble on whether you will have clear enough symptoms in the short term to prompt an antibiotic treatment. Unfortunately unless you get the bullseye rash it's often not that clear that symptoms that appear much later are related to the tick bite.
I'm going to find a doctor who will admit a real disease exists and actually consider it as a possibility. Many don't, and it's irresponsible. Report irresponsible doctors. They aren't hurting for cash.
No I opened this post with my eyes closed, picked a random comment and responded.
My point isn’t that misdiagnoses don’t happen, they happen for a lot of things other than Lyme, but the fact that people will take vengeance on doctors when the detection of Lyme is unpredictable (tests only really detect it within a certain timeframe of infection), the ambiguity around symptoms and their relation to Lyme, and the historical baggage around Lyme in general, makes it a very hard problem for medical professionals to give definite recommendations and or treatments.
