I didn’t discover that ticks were a problem until I was in my mid 20s, and had been rolling around in deer-filled brush for years. Either I got very lucky, or have a chronic tick-borne disease.
I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s. I’ve had every blood test under the sun, numerous sleep studies and tried every vitamin. I’ve had no answers and no change.
Sometimes, I've believed that it impacts my performance at work. Sometimes I feel like I should be retiring, but I’m not even 40 yet. Sometimes, it's not so bad.
I saw a video on controlled hypothermia the other day, which seems like snake oil. I guess that’s next on my list to try. I feel desperate, but I’m just having to get used to the feeling of desperation, because there appears to be no answer or solution.
Signed up to post this. So I have been on this journey with my daughter for the last 7 years, she is now 25, but only got a Lyme diagnosis less than 2 years ago, has been suffering since she was 18.
It’s not just ticks, mosquitos and spiders can apparently carry the bacteria (there is not a lot of consensus about the causes of Lyme, there is the bacterial school of thought and a viral theory). This if the fringe of science, theory’s matter but results matter more.
My daughter had a range of symptoms, fatigue, body aches, circulation issues her feet would change colour blue, red, purple, brain fog.
She had been 5 years on this path trying to deal with this, before the Lyme test was done (we live in nz which lyme is rare, and she likely caught it in Australia which doesn’t acknowledge its existence). Anyway we headed to Germany for hyperthermia treatment. It wasn’t cheap for us, and almost an act of faith in choosing this. I had reservations, at the frontier of medicine everything looks different. People are pursuing options that are unconventional, because the conventional options have been exhausted. At some point everything that is considered mainstream now, once looked unconventional. I know that could be used to justify anything. We spent 3 weeks at St George clinic in Germany.
The theory of Lyme is that is a really slowly replicating bacteria, once every 24 hours vs 20 minutes typical for most. It does respond to antibiotics but the slow replication rate means you would need antibiotics in your system for a much much longer period to have the same number of kill opportunities (it is during replication that bacteria will absorb antibiotics and be killed as I understand it). Roughly you would need antibiotics for 3x24 as long as a typical antibiotic treatment (over 2 years of antibiotics which would ruin the rest of your body).
The hyperthermia treatment is intense, it is designed to mimic a fever. One of our bodies approaches to killing bacteria, is getting them hot enough to rupture their cells.
It wasnt an easy or a quick fix after treatment, which was disheartening at times. But a year on she has just noticed she is feeling better, has little to no pain and just the other day took a run along the beach.
Anyway I just wanted to endorse a plan you were already thinking about. I acknowledge that a chronic health issue is hard, hard in a way that those of us who a generally healthy can’t even comprehend.
I wish you all the best
Thank you for taking the time to sign up and write this. I'm glad your daughter is feeling better, and I wish her a continued recovery. I will consider this treatment more seriously, but the cost is significant, especially only to hope for results.
Thanks for posting that. I'm constantly thinking about lymes disease when my two young daughters play in anything approaching long grass. I'll file this away in my mind for if worst ever did happen.
This is a great story, and your kindness shows to a random stranger on the internet so I want to commend you for that.
Adding to it, I want to share a bit of my story and some words that could help as well.
I haven't ever checked for Lyme diagnosis, but I've experienced symptoms that are diabetes adjacent and cured those through diet and other experimentation. Through the last 10 years of so I obsessed over and reversed various medical illnesses that were said to be incurable, since for that exact reason as you said "conventional options have been exhausted". In my journey I met one man who exhausted many treatment options for Lyme and his success strategy looked as follows: a) he took EMF seriously and rebuilt his home for EMF minimization (happy to share strategy and solutions for you more here, I follow a cheap mans version of his more expensive work), b) he would take particular vitamins and other nutrients, and c) Rife therapy. He had an expensive plasma machine that would send particular frequencies into his body through light plasma (more expensive Rife frequency modulation end of things) but many machines exist that are cheaper. Spooky sells these machines, some of the solutions include PEMF which I believe are electricity based. I've used their remote frequency machines and also a scalar version for overall health and haven't had to use them since. My experience with Rife is limited. My basic drivers for health now are grounding for inflammation reduction (feet on grass every so often, or grounding mats), EMF reduction, information management (try notification zero and how it affects your biology: no notifications on your phones or devices ever and that includes notification bubbles - Calls from loved ones OK), and diet/food/water/sleep. I'll also use a Schumann tuned set of tuning forks I have 2 sets one that use a weight vibration and another that uses just the sound. my sleep and stress improve considerably when I use the forks, and I believe they have an affect like grounding but on the frequency end only. When I was first starting this journey, I would do pure cold showers in winter months and kept the practice for years, it was the first time I noticed a big shift in my health and wellbeing that lasted and also kept my mood elevated for a while after. I have also used more expensive cold baths, cryotherapy, etc and I think they can all approach and work for the type of Hypothermia treatment that geekfeatures is mentioning. My intuition is experimentation with these first, 3-5x a week, would mimic a similar process in the body to the hypothermic heavy therapy and may even be triggering it at a similar level to the paid therapies.
Anyway I'll stop there to keep this limited in word count. Feel free to reach out here or personally via hello@mannan.is and good luck.
Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now
Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.
If you think you have long Covid, you should do some research about CIRS (Chronic Inflammation Response Syndrome). It is a condition caused by exposure to toxic mold from water damaged (inside or out) buildings. There is growing evidence that there isn't actually a separate condition for long Covid, but rather it is Covid-triggered CIRS. (Lyme can trigger it too). (Note: only about 25% of people are genetically susceptible to suffering from CIRS)
CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.
Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.
It doesn't necessarily have to be white mold either. Anything that generates a persistent immune response can keep it going once it triggered. Like really bad allergies.
Largely it was a multi-year process trying to find the source of all my symptoms. Eventually, I found someone posting on a Reddit forum about long Covid and they suggested to someone that they have problems with mold exposure instead. I collected dust from my house and sent it off to be tested. The test came back with an UNINHABITABLE result for Aspergillus versicolor (a highly resilient and ubiquitous indoor mold frequently found in water-damaged building materials like drywall, carpet, and ceiling tiles)
You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).
I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.
How kind of you to say.... If you do much research on the topic, you will find that this is the standard advice. It is almost impossible to remove (especially for any porous surface). People with CIRS can by symptomatic even from dead mold spores.
I am just offering a different point of view, not disagreeing with the other experiences on this thread.
I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).
Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.
So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.
I think I may have had long covid or something like that as well.
for something like 12-18 months in 2023-2024 I would only go to work, come home sleep 2 hours and that was all I could manage. I felt so fatigued and tired. I started doing better at the beginning of 2025, and am doing better now. I think it may have been caused by partly illness, and partly the psychological shift to doing nothing social at all for most of covid pandemic.
I had this starting around the beginning of COVID. Was it COVID? Did I get COVID at all? Plausibly, but not definitively. Did I get it at that time? Almost certainly not as I stayed isolated and got tested whenever I wasn't. It could be aging but I think a lot of people chalk things up to aging that are actually due to non-aging-related causes - you just accumulate more past as you age so you're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is. I did go camping several times, once in a region known to have Lyme, without being vaccinated, but that was years after I started noticing chronic fatigue. Conclusion: I really don't know.
At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.
fwiw; I had unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline as a post-COVID induced histamine intolerance with a few bonus attributes. High amounts of histamine would accumulate in my mast cells then get released in 3-5am, undermining sleep and also inhibiting serotonin.
It took me about four years to fully understand my condition. Hope you figure out what is bothering you. The body is incredibly complex.
My gf experiences some thing like this sometimes. Seems to correlate without exercise or excitement or eating histamine rich food.
She takes pentatop to regulate it with some success.
I'm also interested to head about your experience.
That's rough. Same symptoms of low testosterone, which a blood test can measure. This can be caused (even in younger men) through daily exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like BPA and phthalates, heavy metals, and pesticides. Poor lifestyle exposures such as chronic stress, lack of sleep, and high ambient air pollution also significantly suppress hormone production.
Indeed. Thanks for the pointer. My testosterone level is in a happy range, as are most of my levels.
Chronic stress, now that's an interesting one. I've never regarded myself as stressed. Or, if I am stressed, I'm always stressed and it's just normal. But I see no reason to be stressed, but maybe I am. And I wonder, how much of stress is a cause, or a result. I've taken a year off work. Am I better for it? It's hard to say. I'm yet to find anything that I can say helps. I've only really found things that make it worse. Like alcohol, and sugar. Diabetes? Yeah, I've considered it. I've got 6 months of blood sugar monitoring data, with no discernible correlation between my levels and how I feel. Funny world <3
About stress: how's your HRV? Look into sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, vagus nerve and it's relation to HRV. It gives you a more objective way to measure stress.
In particular, Garmin smartwatches have a very good measurement and intepretation with their "stress" and "body battery" features.
I initially thought about sharing this about stress and didn't, but then I read your post.
That's how I learned I was stressed while working. I have a Garmin watch and everyday I get an alert telling me I had a stressful day.
During the day if I do a little check-in where I observe how I feel, I often notice a lot of muscle tension, especially in the plexus area, and that I stop breathing for extended periods of time. I try to consciously relax, which would work for a few minutes before the tension comes again. I end up being exhausted almost everyday. My watch has been telling me I'm either in "recovery" or "strained" for months.
Stress can be difficult to notice, especially when you're stressed.
Yes. I've tried avoiding caffeine during my year off. When I don't (even after weeks of abstinence) I sleep 12-14 hours a night and still need a nap during the day, which is incompatible with having both a day job and something approaching a well-lived life involving laundry. So I drink caffeine, to be compatible with the labour market.
You need more than weeks of abstinence, friend. Ive generally noticed 1-2 months are necessary to recover from all of the awful side effects of caffeine (from drinking a tiny amount of coffee per day - my body is just very sensitive to it). I urge you to try it.
for me, mostly just poor sleep and focus/clarity. It creeps up on you slowly, til you realize youre just in a haze. Once you detox, life is much better.
And, yet, as an addict, i keep convincing myself that I can handle a little bit (like, 6-10 grams daily - which is nothing) and will re-addict myself every few months.
I should say that i have been actually handling 10 grams vastly better lately than i could even 6 grams a few years ago. Not sure what to attribute that to.
I really like coffee - i roast, grind and brew it at home. I should treat it as i do alcohol - only 1 drink, once in a while - but i'll probably remain like this for life...
What were the side effects? High blood pressure, feeling like a "zombie", sleep getting worse?
I'd try centanafadine and see a top ADHD specialist. There are a lot of variables: molecule, dose, release profile, melatonin timing.
What is worth checking:
* Comorbid anxiety or trauma symptoms (PTSD)
* Hormone imbalance
Just because your blood work is perfect, it doesn't mean all is good. I have hypomagnesemia - the tests were perfect, yet my body needs way more magnesium to function properly.
Not just T. Low thyroid hormone levels as well. I just had that diagnosed, after a year or two of feeling “worn out”. I thought it might be T (I’m almost 50 now) but turns out my thyroid was under-active. Relatively easy diagnosis and fix.
Doctors call it a fatigue panel - There's a set of high-yield blood tests for common conditions that they typically order if you're generally tired. Vitamin D, thyroid, iron levels, testosterone in males. Really quite an easy fix if any of those are significantly off. I've had a couple of times I've felt really run down and got labs done, and I was either anemic or hypothyroid, after a month on a higher dose of levothyroxine or on an iron supplement I feel like a new person.
My friend was diagnosed with lyme disease in his mid-20s after years of symptoms similar to your own (brain fog, extreme fatigue, etc.). The hard thing is that even lyme disease itself is a constellation of illnesses, he had to work with mulitple specialists for years to confirm what the issue was and get the proper treatment.
In his case, he is mostly back to normal, albeit gluten intolerant, which will cause his symptoms to redevelop, namely spinal inflammation.
Its hard not to engender helplessness when hearing or dealing with types of issues, but I wish you perserverance in your search for answers, and grace when dealing with your problems.
I've been through similar, don't give up trying to find a solution. I've recently found what mine is, and am doing much better now. Everyone is different, be careful with advice on the internet, but at the least it gives you ideas for further investigation. For me it was elevated homocysteine, with a genetic origin. I could get an analysis by uploading my genome to Genetic Genie, but ultimately the homocysteine test was the proof.
I had elevated homocysteine, treated it (MTHFR gene, therefore methylated B12 / folate, etc), and that had zero effect on my sleep quality, unfortunately.
Tried B6, every variation of magnesium (including threonate), all the typical sleep hygiene stuff.. nothing mattered.
You owe it to yourself to learn about Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS).
It can be caused by lyme but is more often due to exposure to water damaged buildings.
Reasonably priced lab testing can be obtained without jumping through insurance hoops:
https://www.moldco.com/
I have personally suffered from CIRS-wdb (water damaged building) for decades.
By 2012 (age 44) I was so chronically sick with severe neurological, endocrine and digestive symptoms that I could not work and barely slept 3 hours a night for months. Brain fog, "ice pick" pains in the gut, muscular weakness and balance problems were among the many symptoms. It was so bad that I was preparing for the end within a year and was spending my limited time with my wife and young children.
Years of medical tests and consults (Cleveland Clinic) found nothing.
Fortunately, lots of googling found medical articles by Dr Ritchie Shoemaker listing many of the same multi-system symptoms.
From the late 1990s he identified cohorts of patients with such symptoms and developed effective treatments.
I drove out to Maryland and was treated by him from 2012-2013 following the Shoemaker protocol.
We spent a substantial amount remediating the water damage in our home.
My health improved incrementally to the point where I now work productively and actively mountain bike daily at age 59.
I am about 91% recovered and have no doubt that I would have died without treatment.
I take maintanence doses of Welchol and Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) and avoid water damaged buildings.
I have no financial interest in Moldco or Dr Shoemaker but feel compelled to share my experience with those who seem to be suffering similarly.
I almost did not write this post.
Nearly every afflicted person I have shared CIRS info with has ignored it and continued their health decline.
I hope that you or someone reading this will take the steps and improve their health.
I'm not a doctor.
I just recognized symptom clusters consistent with my personal experience and shared information that would hopefully lead them to reach for effective treatment. Additionally, I only speak up when someone expresses frustration that their health provider has no clue what is going on.
When did you last (1) eat a proper salad with no sugary dressing (2) get up early to exercise (3) achieve a suntan (4) spend a week without caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol? (5) catch a sunrise? (6) wake up at an acceptable hour without an alarm? (7) eat a high fiber meal like a vegetable curry?
Other: Dark, cold, quiet bedroom. Sleep study. Vicious dietary improvement. If all else fails: move and change jobs. If that doesn't fix it, try one of those drug induced purges with ibogaine.
Recognizable. I try to increase how much of my wage I save, in case I can’t continue working for ever.
My best answer for my own sake is just burnout, exasperated by some underlying depression. I can have good periods when job stress is low and I make good life choices. Incidentally, I had a blood test show borreliosis randomly 10 years ago, but doubt that’s relevant.
If your job is impacting your health, literally do something else. I know it's seemingly flippant but it's real advice.
I left a very high stress job for one that pays less, but has zero stress. Within 1 week I had to come off the blood pressure medicine. Within 2 months I started weaning off the anxiety meds.
It's like I've been looking at life through frosted glass, and it's suddenly clear. I wish I had done this sooner.
The loss of income isn't the end of the world. You can make it work. I did.
Thanks for the advice. I don’t feel like my job is that bad, honestly. I’m an IT consultant and there’s always just a little too much that needs to be done at my current client. I’m extremely motivated for the task though, and end up overextending time and time again. There are definitely aspects of the project that are stress inducing (big org, lots of meetings, lots of different consulting agencies).
You do get more sensitive to bad lifestyle habits in your 30s, but none of those are normal symptoms attributable to "aging" in your 30s. Really weird when people around this age act like they're just on death's doorstop.
That feels very defeatist, if life only gets worse then I might as well just end it. I prefer to think it's something unexplained and it just shows up more in older people because more things have happened to them so they're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is.
The poor sleep might be the root cause. I’ve got some of the symptoms that you describe but I’ve always had nasal issues that I think are wrecking my sleep through snoring. That’s my theory anyway so I’m pursuing that.
Yes, thank you! I am a subscriber to his channel, and I was surprised to watch his video. I have mixed feelings about the treatment. It is one of these "very expensive fix everyone is looking for, but results aren't guaranteed" things that makes me suspect of the whole thing. I've read several reports of people who had no results, and very few from people with positive results.
Sometimes a treatment, perhaps especially one like that, you have to believe in. And I don't take paracetamol because every time I've taken it I don't really feel any better, than had I not taken any at all. So if the treatment needs me to believe in it, that THIS TIME, once and for all, that it's finally going to cure me, because I've ponied up 30,000 EUR, so it HAS to work, then I'm probably not the right candidate. Once I went to a spiritual healer who asked me to leave half way through because I wasn't playing along.
I'm somewhat hesitant to post this publicly but I'm empathetic with where you are at and maybe it will be helpful to you or others so here goes:
I’ve been chasing a similar symptom cluster: low-grade depression, anhedonia, "burnout", fatigue, poor sleep, stress intolerance, low motivation / executive function, loss of positive emotions including the ability to be "attracted" to things or feel affectionate, and low libido.
For years, I thought this was a mental/emotional health issue. But nothing I did seemed to impact it, including less stress and a sabbatical, and I finally started to wonder if it was more physiological than psychological. My symptoms were psychological (ish) but I started to wonder if there were underlying biological causes that amounted to more than "not handling life well, not trying hard enough, etc."
I eventually ran into a functional medicine practitioner who, for the first time ever, described a process that can happen in our bodies that fit my symptoms to a T. I don't have a good summary of it to post but, essentially, inflammation can cause the brain to become chronically fatigued (in the sense of not having the energy it needs), which can lead to hormone problems, which then recursively cause additional brain health issues. I'm doing a poor job describing it but, when it's described to me, it fit what I experienced almost exactly.
FWIW, it was incredibly liberating when I finally had a reason to think maybe this whole thing was something happening to me instead of being caused by me. A hormone specialist described it as: complex hormonal dysfunction secondary to chronic stress and inflammation.
A functional medicine workup found a mix of hormone-utilization issues, thyroid conversion issues, low-ish usable testosterone despite decent total testosterone, low iron availability despite elevated ferritin, and some inflammation markers. I also have a couple genetic variants that may matter in this context: MTHFR and APOE 3/4.
Mold/mycotoxin exposure is another possible contributor in my case. I’m not convinced it’s “the answer,” but testing suggested past exposure and possible ochratoxin involvement, so it’s now part of the differential rather than something I’d dismiss.
Some non-standard labs that they have started looking at in my case: free+total T, SHBG, estradiol, pregnenolone/DHEA-S, free T3/free T4/reverse T3, iron/TIBC/ferritin/transferrin saturation, B12/folate/homocysteine, inflammatory markers, and mold/home-environment testing if the history fits.
At a recent visit with my provider, she mentioned that just the low free T, thyroid, and iron would be enough to knock someone down and feel terrible. And I have other things going on besides that.
I work with Ashley Giles from Origin Medical in Georgetown, Indiana (USA). I believe she can work with people who aren't local. What I appreciate most about Ashley is that she's willing to look at the whole pattern — endocrine, nutrition, inflammation, sleep, stress physiology, and environment together. And she really knows her stuff.
I'm about 10 months into treatment and expect this to be a 2-3 year process to get back to normal. I'm better than I was...I'm at least mostly functional now on a day to day basis. But a lot of my symptoms are still present in one degree or another. So, no magic bullets here.
Did you mean hyperthermia? This whole thread sent me down a rabbit hole (I have several close folks afflicted by Lyme) and while at first glance hyperthermia might seem woo-ish, there is real research being done, particularly on hyperthermia + antibiotics. The chief drawbacks are cost (I'm seeing $30k and up and not usually covered) and strain on the body. Friedrich Douwes pioneered much of this.
Douwes F. Komplextherapie der chronischen Borreliose (Lyme disease) - Ein neuer Therapieansatz: die Antibiotika augmentierte Thermoeradikation (AAT). OM & Ernährung. 2018;164:F10.
Douwes F. The successful antibiotic augmented thermal eradication of chronic lyme disease. Paper presented at the 32nd ESHO Meeting, Berlin, 16–19 May 2018.
After serious issues piling up for a very long time and an equally long journey to get to the root what was bothering me medically I presented to Dr. Douwes a couple years back in his clinic in Bad Aibling.
The experience was a bit frightening, to say the least. Their methodology to get a diagnosis was basically just examining my medical history followed by a dark field microscopy (i.e. visually checking a blood sample for spirochetes). After that I was diagnosed with late stage lyme and offered two options: a very handwritten prescription (pencil on notepad, w/o doctors signature, not rubberstamped, looking very shady) for herbal ingredients (basically artemisia annua leaves and some roots to brew a tea) - without any tips where to get that from and not really exact dosages given. Option 2: ambulant Hyperthermia + painkillers (to supress pain from the hyperthermia) + a combination of antibiotics (parenteral) for 2 or 3 weeks. Extracting a fortune (20k ballpark)
They also offer hyperthermia treatment for cancer and long covid & me/cfs if I am not mistaken.
The visit really had a smell to it and left me with unease. Look up the group's company network in the Handelsregister and decide for yourself, I got some PE vibes from it. I chickened out and went to someone else, luckily Germany has quite a few private MDs specializing on lyme and other tickborne diseases. What I got in general: most treatments are not evidence based and theres lots of snake oil around, some of the patients are very desparate, me included back then. PS: I made good progress, but am still on meds since. Apparently there's no eradication for late stage lyme. Maybe there are lucky cases, but the slow growth of borrelia spirochetes makes treatment very tedious, much like or even worse than with tuberculosis. I am sure that their treatment actually does help, but it is kind of a hail mary (combo of broad spectrum antibiotics is basically applying blunt force).
I've had a reckoning with my caffeine metabolism recently. I fall asleep very easily, like head hits pillow and I'm zonked within a minute. But I often wake up at 3 or 4am and am unable to go back asleep.
What I've learned is that caffeine metabolism goes down with age and sleep gets lighter with age. Even if you can fall asleep easily, the residual caffeine in the middle of the night is enough to wake you out of light sleep. I made a tool to convince myself to cut back: http://jitterdone.com
This was my immediate thought. Very small amounts of daily coffee have caused me significant problems with fatigue etc... Takes 1-2 months to get back to feeling good. Strongly urge anyone who feels tired, lack of focus etc to stop all caffeine intake. As with any drug, you're just chasing the initial boost, and really only getting yourself back to baseline.
Yeah. I asked because I had my own heap of problems with caffeine and even with decaf coffee. This thing is a pile of random bioactive substances that are mostly fine for most people until they aren't.
What you could get away with in your twenties doesn't go unpunished once you're around thirty. And what you could get away with around thirty doesn't go unpunished once you're around forty.
yeah, my caffeine issues started around 30. Im nearly 40 and other problems are, indeed, presenting themselves. Young people should, but never will, heed the warnings of old people.
I’m not optimistic this will be all that helpful. Just because the tick you found is negative, that tells you nothing about those you did not find. Just because a tick is positive, that does not mean that it has infected whoever it was attached to.
My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.
Unfortunately there are a number of tick-borne illnesses. Eg, Powassan virus is a viral infection that attacks the central nervous system (leading to encephalitis). It can be transmitted within hours or even just 15 minutes of tick attachment.
Another is Alpha Gal. It is a molecule carried in tick saliva that can cause serious allergies to red meat and even dairy. Because the molecule is in the saliva, it can be delivered immediately.
> My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.
I’ve hear stats as long as 24 hours and as short as 30 seconds. One nurse told me that removing ticks by grasping and pulling means they transmit immediately, because you squeeze their contents through their mouths. I no longer believe any of the stats; seems like it could be at any time.
Whenever someone recommends removal using tweezers, I wonder if the person offering this advice has ever removed a well attached tick. I’ve found tools like a Tick Tornado work better, but are still problematic with smaller ticks.
We always covered them with coal-tar ointment (ichthyol / ichthammal) for a few minutes. They detached without a problem after that, with nothing more than a subtle hint from the tweezers.
Just breaking out the tweezers and yanking away was most emphatically not recommended. It can leave the mouth parts behind, if nothing else.
In my experience it works the same way by simply using a drop of dishwashing detergent on them. After 30 seconds max they want to get out with wriggling legs. Works on me after jogging, on my cats, at the back of their neck. Any other place they can take care by themselves, and do.
Considering how often dogs in my area were covered with ticks, I am surprised we never got one as teenagers, we were running or biking in the same place.
30+ years ago we would use ether to remove them, and I enjoyed burning them afterwards, it was so satisfying...
The cards I found close to useless. The tools in the link from the parent poster, which are actually for pets, work much, much better.
And tiny ones are easy to remove with finger nails and some spit. But it requires some skill, do not stress out the ticks while they are attached and be careful to not partially remove it.
(Just had to remove 3 ticks on me I failed to spot after a late night walk yesterday, bigger and medium sized ones with tool, the small one with fingernail)
edit: and found a 4th one, but a tiny one(nymphe), they don't carry lyme disease as only ticks who have previously bitten a infected animal before will have it
I've removed several hundred ticks using soap on a wet cloth and doing one counter-clockwise rotation on the tick. No lyme, tick-borne encephalitis so far. Key thing is to check after every hike, keep checking their favorite places (where the skin gets thinner and softer) and check before you scratch something that itches.
Having an easy to use method which doesn't need special tools also helps by being able to immediately remove them.
There's the common advice to wear long pants & tuck them into socks. But at times I've found the exact opposite: short pants are fine.
Why: ticks can be hard to find on clothing. So you get home, inspect legs etc, and (later) a tick crawls from pants onto your leg & you may not notice.
Bare legs otoh make it trivial to check for ticks regularly during a walk, and/or when you feel something crawling up your leg. Since they're not yet attached then, a flick of your finger & they're off.
This is very helpful for determining if prophylactic treatment is necessary after discovering a tick.
If someone doesn’t notice a tick then they aren’t going to be considering prophylactic treatment anyway. It’s for the cases where ticks are discovered.
According to the dutch public health institute, the longer the tick is in the body, the bigger the chance of transmission. Early removal also does not prevent lyme, it just reduces the chances.
Next to that, in The Netherlands we have a site to report tick bites and if they had lyme disease or not. It’s good to know if you should be extra vigilant after a bite from a certain area. I think the self-test could be very useful for such sites.
Upstate New York has a site for testing and reporting / tracking. Costs are $80 USD for a comprehensive test though. It looks like they'll test just for Lyme for $20, but if you found a tick on you I imagine you'll want to know all the diseases it has potentially given you. At least I did.
Is there a similar site to report mosquito bites? They also carry many debilitation or fatal diseases.
I live in prime tick country. During peak season (March through June and again September through November) I can get 3 or 4 tick bites a day. I don't always get them all because they're completely painless while they're embedded (although I react strongly after they've been removed) and I've been diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease twice after developing all the classic symptoms. I am not alone in my area. If there was a site where you report tick bites here it would need to be pretty robust to handle the load and it would serve no purpose.
The local authorities have acknowledged the rampant outbreak of Lyme in the region. You do not need to provide the tick to authorities for identification. All you need to do is go to any pharmacy and tell them you've been bitten by a tick and they'll write you a prescription for Doxycycline on the spot.
I think it's super helpful. Sure it doesn't help with ticks, you don't find, but in my experience it starts to itch eventually even with the tick attached. If it's negative good, if it's positive go see a doctor.
This is one of the things that is oft repeated by my vector disease colleagues -- your infection may not be caused by the tick you found, but by the tick you didn't.
Do ticks commonly detach on their own before being noticed? Because from what I’ve seen of fully engorged ticks I don’t think I would fail to discover that. Or maybe an earlier stage where they’re smaller?
I always thought that too. I spend a lot of time outside and check rigorously. Very often I find a recently attached tick. Found a fully-engorged deer tick half-detached not too long ago - pulled it off jaw-intact. In treatment for early-mid stage disseminated Lyme again, for the third time. Certainly a hidden tax one pays living in New England...I've recently put a lot more effort into things like permethrin.
From what I understand, you're spot on with your last note. Larval stage can be extremely hard to see even when fully engorged. Adult-stage ticks (at least Deer Ticks) are the size of a large grain of cooked brown rice. I've seen fully engorged nymph-stage that rival the size of a grape...
I’ve been fortunate that all the ticks I’ve found on myself I discovered before they began feeding because I am very hairy and they tickled my hairs on my legs as they made their way up.
One other I found crawling up my white tshirt. Good reminder to wear light colored clothes when you’re out where ticks are.
As everyone is different, there is no "best" method to remove one however there's lots of wrong ways. The only thing everyone agrees with is sooner is always better. I'm surprised "laser tick remover" isn't a thing yet.
for a prophylactic dose of antibiotics after having a tick latched for an unknown amount of time
the US gets a persistent amount of emergency room visits for this sort of treatment (tens of thousands annually), and with all the news about increased tick and lyme exposure a larger number of people treat it preemptively, especially with children
Hm, that approach would have me at the doctor every second day and being on antibiotic all the time. I am outdoors a lot and had 5 ticks on me just today after not checking enough last night after being outside.
I only would consider antibiotics if the red ring appears. In general I suppose I already have resistance .. or the disease slumbering in my body.
Same. I've found engorged ticks a half dozen times in my life. Never had the red ring and never had antibiotics for it. I've got hypothyroidism (genetic) and some mental health issues, but I am otherwise healthy and run 15 miles a week.
I really don't believe that the vague long term symptoms a lot of people are describing in this thread are from ticks, especially people who don't spend much time outside in lyme endemic regions. Lyme has become a favorite label for quacks to describe the fatigue/pain syndrome that is sometimes called fibromyalgia. We don't really know what causes it (and it's probably not ticks), and taking high dose doxycycline for months is not the answer, other than maybe as a placebo.
I think you need to stop overthinking. Yes it can make you sick, but the only thing you can do is be on the lookout for it and be smart about avoiding it. I've had around 4-5 ticks in the last years, my kids and family probably around 15-20, one recently near my ankle that probably could've been avoided if I wasn't wearing short trousers. But anyway nobody ever got sick from it and we live in a region with a high prevalence of tick caused encephalitis. There's a vaccine for that so we're all vaccinated now.
You're the smart one.. Unfortunately I didn't find the tick on time and have been sick with persistent Lyme for over 10 years. Hoping for some kind of solution soon.
While this at-home test kit is neat, there already are solutions to this problem which are likely more beneficial to the overall awareness of tick-borne illness. In the US, one can send a tick (alive, dead, in shreds) to Penn State’s tick research lab via usps and get results in just a few days. Customers can select what results they’re looking for, as ticks don’t solely carry one “lyme disease” marker.
I would feel better sending a tick that i pulled off of myself or my pets to a dedicated research lab rather than buy some one-off test kits which don’t contribute to the overall incidence rate of tick-borne illness.
I even sent a tick that I found in a potted plant from home depot (never attached to me) which turned out to carry rocky mountain spotted fever. I only sent that random tick in just to see if it carried anything, and since seeing the report from Penn State Ive wondered if i had contracted RMSF what my medical journey would have looked like, since i live on the opposite side of the continent from those ticks and i had found it mid-December. That would have required a Gregory House differential diagnosis where I live.
However it is somewhat area specific and Massachusetts is a hotbed when it comes to lyme disease carrying ticks. Lyme really should be treated right away.
I think urgent care wouldn't really be out of the question for a tick bite there. Telehealth is also something that likely could work here. It should be a 5 minute "Hey, got a tick bite, here's the picture of the tick, can I get a prescription for some antibiotics".
Again, I don't think you should be given antibiotics for a tick bite, unless you start showing symptoms, namely the infamous erythema migrans? Most ticks don't carry lyme.
It's region dependent and most people aren't commonly getting ticks in the first place.
The reason to bias towards earlier treatment is because lyme disease can potentially result in nerve damage. For something that's already uncommon (a tick bite) throwing antibiotics at it isn't a terrible thing. Especially because that's also the general treatment for a number of tick born illnesses which don't have the obvious "bullseye".
I get the "we shouldn't needlessly take antibiotics" wisdom. But that's more about common ailments and situations where they aren't needed and don't help. Like, if you have a sore throat you shouldn't immediately get antibiotics.
Ticks are extremely tough to kill, compared with the myth that some people hold that they can only be drowned (you can obliterate them pretty well with a rock) I'm pretty sure many return to the wild unscathed.
And some even just pull them off and squish them a bit and then throw them down the toilet, bin, outside. Those very likely survive for a new bite.
I usually trap it between two pieces of tape and then put it in a plastic bag and keep it in the freezer for a few weeks in case someone gets sick and I might need it as a sample.
I have no idea if that is actually necessary, but it's easy and I think that probably kills it.
For me, vigorous exercise, riding my bike, running, jumping rope, has always made me feel better mentally and physically whether it was a pathogen funk or just life and feeling down or symptomatic as some describe below. I always check my kids and myself after hikes, especially in tall grass or shrubs. I've found ticks here and there over the years. The cathartic effect of high-intensity exercise where you push yourself to what you think is your limit is amazing for your physical and mental well being. The old Sufi saying, "Movement is life; stillness is death" is my mantra. I have friends who avoid hiking for fear of ticks and Lyme disease. It's a shame, since being outdoors in the sun, smelling the woods, and taking in the views while walking are priceless. Movement over pharmaceuticals.
Start thinking about α-gal syndrome, even if you're in The North. I just pulled an adult Lone Star tick off my back last night. I had no idea that they had made it to Northern Illinois. Now I get to spend the summer waiting to see if a burger is going to kill me.
My pet theory is that lyme disease coevolved to make mamals "addicted" to ticks. Every reinfection and the resulting fever-body pyrolysis, resets the infections malaise sideffects for a while. Thus, if you where outside all the time, you would be conditioned to expose yourselfs to ticks all the time, to feel "healthy" again. If those little bastards secreted fentanyl it would have a similar outcome.
it's good to have test for Lyme in case of strange symptoms (joint pain etc.) but check for alpha-tryptasemia which is more probable (5% people have it).
Growing up in the UK, I never thought about ticks, ever. I then moved to Poland, and remember thinking the Poles were crazy for worrying about tall grass all the time. It was a huge 'wtf are you doing lol?' moment... Then a friend of a friend got fucked over by Lyme disease.
Now I've developed a case of Polish paranoia and tuck my trousers in socks, even if it's 35 degs :/
We stopped burning grass and got ticks infestation. I used work and play in tall grass as a 7 year old in my grapa farm. Never got a tick. 30 years later I found 7 ticks on my cloths after 2 hours walk on the same farm.
We are giving our dog Fluralaner/Bravecto[1] against ticks which paralyzes and kills them when they bite, drastically reducing potential exposure to Lyme disease. Unfortunately not approved for humans and therefore an interesting inverse: humans can get vaccinated against TBEV but not against Lyme disease whereas dogs can get vaccinated against Lyme disease but not TBEV.
It might be irrational but ticks terrify me (grew up in the Northwest where they aren’t so much a thing) and make me want to avoid moving to the East entirely
TLDR: A startup called LymeAlert is launching a $40 at-home test (August 2026) that tells you in 15 minutes whether a tick carries Lyme disease. You grind the tick in a container, insert a chemical strip, and it changes color if Lyme bacteria are present. Founded by an MIT Sloan MBA / physician assistant who wanted to save people the $50–$450 and week-long wait of lab testing. Caveat: it only detects Lyme (not other tick-borne infections like Alpha-gal), though a multi-pathogen version is planned for next year. They're also building a smartphone app to crowdsource infected-tick locations.
Nah. The surrounding conversation here is an absolutely beautiful example of why people shouldn’t be able to take whatever they want, whenever they want.
The facebook/youtube grade quackery is everywhere.
There's a big difference of telling OTHER PEOPLE what drugs and stuff to do, and CHOOSING FOR YOURSELF.
Call it quackery, or whatever other name. I do not trust the medical establishment. Most don't even follow scientific guidelines for treatment. They're lucky to even read the old MR. Usually its for 'cover my ass' reasons, and not correlating treatment.
I've even known women friends who had doctors say "oh its hysteria", or "lose weight", for a variety of issues. And when they go to a decent doc, its correctly identified as endometriosis. And of course the shit docs won't tell you they're shit. They have your money already. And insurance sees "doctor visit" so any others are out of pocket.
So yeah, I do my own research. I pay for my own tests. You can contact cheap labs out of country for a variety of tests.
And in the end, I'm capable of treating myself, either with the drugs, or synthesizing it myself. I don't need your or anybody's permission.
I see both points of view. In capitalism, it is government's job to compensate for negative externalities. Government restricted common people from making voluntary contracts with antibiotic manufacturers because of antibiotic resistance, but that creates a new negative externality of preventing people from healing themselves cost-effectively. So government should be providing the doctors for nearly-free so people can still get treatment.
Unregulated use of antibiotics has negative consequences for the rest of society, in that it promotes antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. Many people try to take antibiotics (and pressure doctors for prescriptions) for likely viral infections where there's no chance of them working. Most people aren't great with attention to detail (qv: you misspelled both antibiotic names) and won't finish a course of antibiotics if symptoms fade even when they're explicitly instructed to do so (which, again, is important for avoiding the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains).
No, well the point was that noise, chorus, or feedback did not exist. There was no such thing. Therefore, the technical workaround was to place two amplifiers, face to face in order to "mimic" distortion.
This is the way that "Loveless" (1991) was recorded, sans anesthesia.
How about loosening restrictions on deer hunting as part of the policy change to reduce deer populations and, consequently, tick populations, that Governor Healey grandstanded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spoke passionately about earlier this year
In Czechia, one of the most infested places are city parks where people walk their dogs. Lots of people, too, so the chances of transmission are high. I don't think that a pet hunting season would pass the Parliament, though :)
Maybe some sort of biological control should be introduced instead. Guinea fowl on steroids.
If we allow ourselves a bit of science fiction, a drone flying over tall grass and burning every questing tick with laser would likely reduce the populations as well. A questing tick sits on the end of a blade of grass, waiting for a host; as such, it is necessarily visible.
and the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels, as well as that you have to kill basically all deer to the point of about 8 deer per square mile, since one deer can carry 2000-3000 new ticks. which is basically impossible on mainland because new deer just wander over.
I wasn't making a scientific statement about whether depopulating the deer will help; the governor of Massachusetts already did. I'm saying that it's pathetic to blame it all on deer and then not eliminate the pointlessly onerous burden on culling their population.
But since you're being needlessly snarky about it (it's not productive to suggest killing "the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels"), here:
>After hunts were initiated, number and frequency of deer observations in the community were greatly reduced as were resident-reported cases of Lyme disease. Number of resident-reported cases of Lyme disease per 100 households was strongly correlated to deer density in the community. Reducing deer density to 5.1 deer per square kilometer resulted in a 76% reduction in tick abundance, 70% reduction in the entomological risk index, and 80% reduction in resident-reported cases of Lyme disease in the community from before to after a hunt was initiated.
As I said - on mainland. That study was done on a peninsula community surrounded by water, except on the north side, which was mostly a nature preserve where a 6 foot high fence on that side prevented new deer from entering.
So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.
Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.
And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.
I didn’t discover that ticks were a problem until I was in my mid 20s, and had been rolling around in deer-filled brush for years. Either I got very lucky, or have a chronic tick-borne disease.
I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s. I’ve had every blood test under the sun, numerous sleep studies and tried every vitamin. I’ve had no answers and no change.
Sometimes, I've believed that it impacts my performance at work. Sometimes I feel like I should be retiring, but I’m not even 40 yet. Sometimes, it's not so bad.
I saw a video on controlled hypothermia the other day, which seems like snake oil. I guess that’s next on my list to try. I feel desperate, but I’m just having to get used to the feeling of desperation, because there appears to be no answer or solution.
Signed up to post this. So I have been on this journey with my daughter for the last 7 years, she is now 25, but only got a Lyme diagnosis less than 2 years ago, has been suffering since she was 18. It’s not just ticks, mosquitos and spiders can apparently carry the bacteria (there is not a lot of consensus about the causes of Lyme, there is the bacterial school of thought and a viral theory). This if the fringe of science, theory’s matter but results matter more. My daughter had a range of symptoms, fatigue, body aches, circulation issues her feet would change colour blue, red, purple, brain fog. She had been 5 years on this path trying to deal with this, before the Lyme test was done (we live in nz which lyme is rare, and she likely caught it in Australia which doesn’t acknowledge its existence). Anyway we headed to Germany for hyperthermia treatment. It wasn’t cheap for us, and almost an act of faith in choosing this. I had reservations, at the frontier of medicine everything looks different. People are pursuing options that are unconventional, because the conventional options have been exhausted. At some point everything that is considered mainstream now, once looked unconventional. I know that could be used to justify anything. We spent 3 weeks at St George clinic in Germany.
The theory of Lyme is that is a really slowly replicating bacteria, once every 24 hours vs 20 minutes typical for most. It does respond to antibiotics but the slow replication rate means you would need antibiotics in your system for a much much longer period to have the same number of kill opportunities (it is during replication that bacteria will absorb antibiotics and be killed as I understand it). Roughly you would need antibiotics for 3x24 as long as a typical antibiotic treatment (over 2 years of antibiotics which would ruin the rest of your body). The hyperthermia treatment is intense, it is designed to mimic a fever. One of our bodies approaches to killing bacteria, is getting them hot enough to rupture their cells. It wasnt an easy or a quick fix after treatment, which was disheartening at times. But a year on she has just noticed she is feeling better, has little to no pain and just the other day took a run along the beach. Anyway I just wanted to endorse a plan you were already thinking about. I acknowledge that a chronic health issue is hard, hard in a way that those of us who a generally healthy can’t even comprehend. I wish you all the best
Thank you for taking the time to sign up and write this. I'm glad your daughter is feeling better, and I wish her a continued recovery. I will consider this treatment more seriously, but the cost is significant, especially only to hope for results.
Just a note, in case it was missed and isn't a mistake: you posted about controlled hyp O thermia, the other person posted about hyp ER thermia.
Thanks for posting that. I'm constantly thinking about lymes disease when my two young daughters play in anything approaching long grass. I'll file this away in my mind for if worst ever did happen.
This is a great story, and your kindness shows to a random stranger on the internet so I want to commend you for that.
Adding to it, I want to share a bit of my story and some words that could help as well.
I haven't ever checked for Lyme diagnosis, but I've experienced symptoms that are diabetes adjacent and cured those through diet and other experimentation. Through the last 10 years of so I obsessed over and reversed various medical illnesses that were said to be incurable, since for that exact reason as you said "conventional options have been exhausted". In my journey I met one man who exhausted many treatment options for Lyme and his success strategy looked as follows: a) he took EMF seriously and rebuilt his home for EMF minimization (happy to share strategy and solutions for you more here, I follow a cheap mans version of his more expensive work), b) he would take particular vitamins and other nutrients, and c) Rife therapy. He had an expensive plasma machine that would send particular frequencies into his body through light plasma (more expensive Rife frequency modulation end of things) but many machines exist that are cheaper. Spooky sells these machines, some of the solutions include PEMF which I believe are electricity based. I've used their remote frequency machines and also a scalar version for overall health and haven't had to use them since. My experience with Rife is limited. My basic drivers for health now are grounding for inflammation reduction (feet on grass every so often, or grounding mats), EMF reduction, information management (try notification zero and how it affects your biology: no notifications on your phones or devices ever and that includes notification bubbles - Calls from loved ones OK), and diet/food/water/sleep. I'll also use a Schumann tuned set of tuning forks I have 2 sets one that use a weight vibration and another that uses just the sound. my sleep and stress improve considerably when I use the forks, and I believe they have an affect like grounding but on the frequency end only. When I was first starting this journey, I would do pure cold showers in winter months and kept the practice for years, it was the first time I noticed a big shift in my health and wellbeing that lasted and also kept my mood elevated for a while after. I have also used more expensive cold baths, cryotherapy, etc and I think they can all approach and work for the type of Hypothermia treatment that geekfeatures is mentioning. My intuition is experimentation with these first, 3-5x a week, would mimic a similar process in the body to the hypothermic heavy therapy and may even be triggering it at a similar level to the paid therapies.
Anyway I'll stop there to keep this limited in word count. Feel free to reach out here or personally via hello@mannan.is and good luck.
Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now
Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.
If you think you have long Covid, you should do some research about CIRS (Chronic Inflammation Response Syndrome). It is a condition caused by exposure to toxic mold from water damaged (inside or out) buildings. There is growing evidence that there isn't actually a separate condition for long Covid, but rather it is Covid-triggered CIRS. (Lyme can trigger it too). (Note: only about 25% of people are genetically susceptible to suffering from CIRS)
CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.
Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.
It doesn't necessarily have to be white mold either. Anything that generates a persistent immune response can keep it going once it triggered. Like really bad allergies.
Thanks for writing this up. How did you figure out it was toxic white mold, or rather, what tests helped you get there?
Largely it was a multi-year process trying to find the source of all my symptoms. Eventually, I found someone posting on a Reddit forum about long Covid and they suggested to someone that they have problems with mold exposure instead. I collected dust from my house and sent it off to be tested. The test came back with an UNINHABITABLE result for Aspergillus versicolor (a highly resilient and ubiquitous indoor mold frequently found in water-damaged building materials like drywall, carpet, and ceiling tiles)
You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).
I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.
Throwing all your stuff away seems wasteful.
How kind of you to say.... If you do much research on the topic, you will find that this is the standard advice. It is almost impossible to remove (especially for any porous surface). People with CIRS can by symptomatic even from dead mold spores.
I am just offering a different point of view, not disagreeing with the other experiences on this thread.
I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).
Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.
So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.
I think I may have had long covid or something like that as well. for something like 12-18 months in 2023-2024 I would only go to work, come home sleep 2 hours and that was all I could manage. I felt so fatigued and tired. I started doing better at the beginning of 2025, and am doing better now. I think it may have been caused by partly illness, and partly the psychological shift to doing nothing social at all for most of covid pandemic.
I had this starting around the beginning of COVID. Was it COVID? Did I get COVID at all? Plausibly, but not definitively. Did I get it at that time? Almost certainly not as I stayed isolated and got tested whenever I wasn't. It could be aging but I think a lot of people chalk things up to aging that are actually due to non-aging-related causes - you just accumulate more past as you age so you're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is. I did go camping several times, once in a region known to have Lyme, without being vaccinated, but that was years after I started noticing chronic fatigue. Conclusion: I really don't know.
At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.
fwiw; I had unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline as a post-COVID induced histamine intolerance with a few bonus attributes. High amounts of histamine would accumulate in my mast cells then get released in 3-5am, undermining sleep and also inhibiting serotonin.
It took me about four years to fully understand my condition. Hope you figure out what is bothering you. The body is incredibly complex.
What did you do about this? Is it at all related to allergy levels? How do you measure your histamine level on a daily basis?
My gf experiences some thing like this sometimes. Seems to correlate without exercise or excitement or eating histamine rich food. She takes pentatop to regulate it with some success. I'm also interested to head about your experience.
How did you figure this one out and how did you resolve it? Asking for a friend!
How did you figure this one out and how did you resolve it? Asking for ME!
You can't just make a post like this and not say what the condition was or what you did!!
That's rough. Same symptoms of low testosterone, which a blood test can measure. This can be caused (even in younger men) through daily exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like BPA and phthalates, heavy metals, and pesticides. Poor lifestyle exposures such as chronic stress, lack of sleep, and high ambient air pollution also significantly suppress hormone production.
Indeed. Thanks for the pointer. My testosterone level is in a happy range, as are most of my levels.
Chronic stress, now that's an interesting one. I've never regarded myself as stressed. Or, if I am stressed, I'm always stressed and it's just normal. But I see no reason to be stressed, but maybe I am. And I wonder, how much of stress is a cause, or a result. I've taken a year off work. Am I better for it? It's hard to say. I'm yet to find anything that I can say helps. I've only really found things that make it worse. Like alcohol, and sugar. Diabetes? Yeah, I've considered it. I've got 6 months of blood sugar monitoring data, with no discernible correlation between my levels and how I feel. Funny world <3
About stress: how's your HRV? Look into sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, vagus nerve and it's relation to HRV. It gives you a more objective way to measure stress.
In particular, Garmin smartwatches have a very good measurement and intepretation with their "stress" and "body battery" features.
I initially thought about sharing this about stress and didn't, but then I read your post.
That's how I learned I was stressed while working. I have a Garmin watch and everyday I get an alert telling me I had a stressful day.
During the day if I do a little check-in where I observe how I feel, I often notice a lot of muscle tension, especially in the plexus area, and that I stop breathing for extended periods of time. I try to consciously relax, which would work for a few minutes before the tension comes again. I end up being exhausted almost everyday. My watch has been telling me I'm either in "recovery" or "strained" for months.
Stress can be difficult to notice, especially when you're stressed.
It's low when I've got a job, or need a job. Double, when I don't. I have years of data on this.
Do you drink coffee?
Yes. I've tried avoiding caffeine during my year off. When I don't (even after weeks of abstinence) I sleep 12-14 hours a night and still need a nap during the day, which is incompatible with having both a day job and something approaching a well-lived life involving laundry. So I drink caffeine, to be compatible with the labour market.
You need more than weeks of abstinence, friend. Ive generally noticed 1-2 months are necessary to recover from all of the awful side effects of caffeine (from drinking a tiny amount of coffee per day - my body is just very sensitive to it). I urge you to try it.
OK, from tomorrow, I will abstain for caffeine until 21st September at the earliest and take a read. Let's see if I will still have a job :)
yeah. 2 month is good number.
if you burn out at same time - it can take half year.
caffein makes you work TWO-FOUR times slower than you could without.
yeah, that is number i measured on self.
and yet i still do it - drugs are drugs - coffee makes me happy - cappuccino - to make effect longer and less strait compared to black shots.
also do not drink in the morning - feel pain of starting a day:)
the only reason you will not have job - you can start hating your job and leave. but you would do job more productive without coffee.
> all of the awful side effects of caffeine
If I may ask as a coffee addict, what were some of these that affected you specifically?
for me, mostly just poor sleep and focus/clarity. It creeps up on you slowly, til you realize youre just in a haze. Once you detox, life is much better.
And, yet, as an addict, i keep convincing myself that I can handle a little bit (like, 6-10 grams daily - which is nothing) and will re-addict myself every few months.
I should say that i have been actually handling 10 grams vastly better lately than i could even 6 grams a few years ago. Not sure what to attribute that to.
I really like coffee - i roast, grind and brew it at home. I should treat it as i do alcohol - only 1 drink, once in a while - but i'll probably remain like this for life...
hard to switch attention and context.
easy to fall into "first idea good idea trap".
lack of ability to work in priorities.
lack of ability achieve long term goals, as long as these are not just extensive usage of self.
procrastination.
all this before even health issues like blood pressure and sleep disruption.
if worth to drop at least once for half year - experience panic attacks may be - and get on track back with better control of addiction :)
Have tired ADHD diagnosis?
I have one :) Unmedicated. Side-effects impacted me more than the meds helped.
What were the side effects? High blood pressure, feeling like a "zombie", sleep getting worse?
I'd try centanafadine and see a top ADHD specialist. There are a lot of variables: molecule, dose, release profile, melatonin timing.
What is worth checking:
* Comorbid anxiety or trauma symptoms (PTSD)
* Hormone imbalance
Just because your blood work is perfect, it doesn't mean all is good. I have hypomagnesemia - the tests were perfect, yet my body needs way more magnesium to function properly.
[dead]
Not just T. Low thyroid hormone levels as well. I just had that diagnosed, after a year or two of feeling “worn out”. I thought it might be T (I’m almost 50 now) but turns out my thyroid was under-active. Relatively easy diagnosis and fix.
Doctors call it a fatigue panel - There's a set of high-yield blood tests for common conditions that they typically order if you're generally tired. Vitamin D, thyroid, iron levels, testosterone in males. Really quite an easy fix if any of those are significantly off. I've had a couple of times I've felt really run down and got labs done, and I was either anemic or hypothyroid, after a month on a higher dose of levothyroxine or on an iron supplement I feel like a new person.
My friend was diagnosed with lyme disease in his mid-20s after years of symptoms similar to your own (brain fog, extreme fatigue, etc.). The hard thing is that even lyme disease itself is a constellation of illnesses, he had to work with mulitple specialists for years to confirm what the issue was and get the proper treatment.
In his case, he is mostly back to normal, albeit gluten intolerant, which will cause his symptoms to redevelop, namely spinal inflammation.
Its hard not to engender helplessness when hearing or dealing with types of issues, but I wish you perserverance in your search for answers, and grace when dealing with your problems.
I've been through similar, don't give up trying to find a solution. I've recently found what mine is, and am doing much better now. Everyone is different, be careful with advice on the internet, but at the least it gives you ideas for further investigation. For me it was elevated homocysteine, with a genetic origin. I could get an analysis by uploading my genome to Genetic Genie, but ultimately the homocysteine test was the proof.
I had elevated homocysteine, treated it (MTHFR gene, therefore methylated B12 / folate, etc), and that had zero effect on my sleep quality, unfortunately.
Tried B6, every variation of magnesium (including threonate), all the typical sleep hygiene stuff.. nothing mattered.
You owe it to yourself to learn about Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS). It can be caused by lyme but is more often due to exposure to water damaged buildings.
It is treatable and the science is backed by peer-reviewed academic papers. https://www.survivingmold.com/legal-resources/publications/p...
Reasonably priced lab testing can be obtained without jumping through insurance hoops: https://www.moldco.com/
I have personally suffered from CIRS-wdb (water damaged building) for decades. By 2012 (age 44) I was so chronically sick with severe neurological, endocrine and digestive symptoms that I could not work and barely slept 3 hours a night for months. Brain fog, "ice pick" pains in the gut, muscular weakness and balance problems were among the many symptoms. It was so bad that I was preparing for the end within a year and was spending my limited time with my wife and young children. Years of medical tests and consults (Cleveland Clinic) found nothing.
Fortunately, lots of googling found medical articles by Dr Ritchie Shoemaker listing many of the same multi-system symptoms. From the late 1990s he identified cohorts of patients with such symptoms and developed effective treatments. I drove out to Maryland and was treated by him from 2012-2013 following the Shoemaker protocol. We spent a substantial amount remediating the water damage in our home. My health improved incrementally to the point where I now work productively and actively mountain bike daily at age 59. I am about 91% recovered and have no doubt that I would have died without treatment. I take maintanence doses of Welchol and Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) and avoid water damaged buildings.
I have no financial interest in Moldco or Dr Shoemaker but feel compelled to share my experience with those who seem to be suffering similarly.
I almost did not write this post. Nearly every afflicted person I have shared CIRS info with has ignored it and continued their health decline. I hope that you or someone reading this will take the steps and improve their health.
Nearly every person you have shared CIRS info with was formally diagnosed with CIRS by a doctor? Or were you the one diagnosing them?
I'm not a doctor. I just recognized symptom clusters consistent with my personal experience and shared information that would hopefully lead them to reach for effective treatment. Additionally, I only speak up when someone expresses frustration that their health provider has no clue what is going on.
When did you last (1) eat a proper salad with no sugary dressing (2) get up early to exercise (3) achieve a suntan (4) spend a week without caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol? (5) catch a sunrise? (6) wake up at an acceptable hour without an alarm? (7) eat a high fiber meal like a vegetable curry?
Other: Dark, cold, quiet bedroom. Sleep study. Vicious dietary improvement. If all else fails: move and change jobs. If that doesn't fix it, try one of those drug induced purges with ibogaine.
This
Recognizable. I try to increase how much of my wage I save, in case I can’t continue working for ever.
My best answer for my own sake is just burnout, exasperated by some underlying depression. I can have good periods when job stress is low and I make good life choices. Incidentally, I had a blood test show borreliosis randomly 10 years ago, but doubt that’s relevant.
If your job is impacting your health, literally do something else. I know it's seemingly flippant but it's real advice.
I left a very high stress job for one that pays less, but has zero stress. Within 1 week I had to come off the blood pressure medicine. Within 2 months I started weaning off the anxiety meds.
It's like I've been looking at life through frosted glass, and it's suddenly clear. I wish I had done this sooner.
The loss of income isn't the end of the world. You can make it work. I did.
Thanks for the advice. I don’t feel like my job is that bad, honestly. I’m an IT consultant and there’s always just a little too much that needs to be done at my current client. I’m extremely motivated for the task though, and end up overextending time and time again. There are definitely aspects of the project that are stress inducing (big org, lots of meetings, lots of different consulting agencies).
> I’ve been battling unexplained anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep and cognitive decline throughout my 30s.
If it's not severe, it may be simply getting older.
You do get more sensitive to bad lifestyle habits in your 30s, but none of those are normal symptoms attributable to "aging" in your 30s. Really weird when people around this age act like they're just on death's doorstop.
That feels very defeatist, if life only gets worse then I might as well just end it. I prefer to think it's something unexplained and it just shows up more in older people because more things have happened to them so they're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is.
The whole trick to life is that none of this matters and if you can hold it together long enough it’s still enjoyable to be alive and to die.
Emotionally integrating that outlook is easier said than done. It's also just one of many healthy outcomes of an existential crisis.
It's possible. If this is how it is supposed to be, I was thoroughly miss sold my ticket into this life thing. No refunds though, I guess :)
The poor sleep might be the root cause. I’ve got some of the symptoms that you describe but I’ve always had nasal issues that I think are wrecking my sleep through snoring. That’s my theory anyway so I’m pursuing that.
Easily proven or disproven with a sleep study. You can get home tests too. Wishing you the best!
Re: hypothermia, watch this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwtPtlcNXEs
Yes, thank you! I am a subscriber to his channel, and I was surprised to watch his video. I have mixed feelings about the treatment. It is one of these "very expensive fix everyone is looking for, but results aren't guaranteed" things that makes me suspect of the whole thing. I've read several reports of people who had no results, and very few from people with positive results.
Sometimes a treatment, perhaps especially one like that, you have to believe in. And I don't take paracetamol because every time I've taken it I don't really feel any better, than had I not taken any at all. So if the treatment needs me to believe in it, that THIS TIME, once and for all, that it's finally going to cure me, because I've ponied up 30,000 EUR, so it HAS to work, then I'm probably not the right candidate. Once I went to a spiritual healer who asked me to leave half way through because I wasn't playing along.
I think in that guys case its hypERthermia not hypOthermia since they elevate his temperature. Artificial fever basically.
Interesting enough; Lyme disease come from ticks that fed on infected mice. Like deer-mice or white footed mice. Rodents are the problem.
I accidentally posted this top level, but intended it to be a reply to your post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620008
I'm somewhat hesitant to post this publicly but I'm empathetic with where you are at and maybe it will be helpful to you or others so here goes:
I’ve been chasing a similar symptom cluster: low-grade depression, anhedonia, "burnout", fatigue, poor sleep, stress intolerance, low motivation / executive function, loss of positive emotions including the ability to be "attracted" to things or feel affectionate, and low libido.
For years, I thought this was a mental/emotional health issue. But nothing I did seemed to impact it, including less stress and a sabbatical, and I finally started to wonder if it was more physiological than psychological. My symptoms were psychological (ish) but I started to wonder if there were underlying biological causes that amounted to more than "not handling life well, not trying hard enough, etc."
I eventually ran into a functional medicine practitioner who, for the first time ever, described a process that can happen in our bodies that fit my symptoms to a T. I don't have a good summary of it to post but, essentially, inflammation can cause the brain to become chronically fatigued (in the sense of not having the energy it needs), which can lead to hormone problems, which then recursively cause additional brain health issues. I'm doing a poor job describing it but, when it's described to me, it fit what I experienced almost exactly.
FWIW, it was incredibly liberating when I finally had a reason to think maybe this whole thing was something happening to me instead of being caused by me. A hormone specialist described it as: complex hormonal dysfunction secondary to chronic stress and inflammation.
A functional medicine workup found a mix of hormone-utilization issues, thyroid conversion issues, low-ish usable testosterone despite decent total testosterone, low iron availability despite elevated ferritin, and some inflammation markers. I also have a couple genetic variants that may matter in this context: MTHFR and APOE 3/4.
Mold/mycotoxin exposure is another possible contributor in my case. I’m not convinced it’s “the answer,” but testing suggested past exposure and possible ochratoxin involvement, so it’s now part of the differential rather than something I’d dismiss.
Some non-standard labs that they have started looking at in my case: free+total T, SHBG, estradiol, pregnenolone/DHEA-S, free T3/free T4/reverse T3, iron/TIBC/ferritin/transferrin saturation, B12/folate/homocysteine, inflammatory markers, and mold/home-environment testing if the history fits.
At a recent visit with my provider, she mentioned that just the low free T, thyroid, and iron would be enough to knock someone down and feel terrible. And I have other things going on besides that.
I work with Ashley Giles from Origin Medical in Georgetown, Indiana (USA). I believe she can work with people who aren't local. What I appreciate most about Ashley is that she's willing to look at the whole pattern — endocrine, nutrition, inflammation, sleep, stress physiology, and environment together. And she really knows her stuff.
I'm about 10 months into treatment and expect this to be a 2-3 year process to get back to normal. I'm better than I was...I'm at least mostly functional now on a day to day basis. But a lot of my symptoms are still present in one degree or another. So, no magic bullets here.
If anyone wants to discuss: randy@syrings.us
Did you mean hyperthermia? This whole thread sent me down a rabbit hole (I have several close folks afflicted by Lyme) and while at first glance hyperthermia might seem woo-ish, there is real research being done, particularly on hyperthermia + antibiotics. The chief drawbacks are cost (I'm seeing $30k and up and not usually covered) and strain on the body. Friedrich Douwes pioneered much of this.
Douwes F. Komplextherapie der chronischen Borreliose (Lyme disease) - Ein neuer Therapieansatz: die Antibiotika augmentierte Thermoeradikation (AAT). OM & Ernährung. 2018;164:F10.
Douwes F. The successful antibiotic augmented thermal eradication of chronic lyme disease. Paper presented at the 32nd ESHO Meeting, Berlin, 16–19 May 2018.
Posting with a fresh account for obvious reasons.
After serious issues piling up for a very long time and an equally long journey to get to the root what was bothering me medically I presented to Dr. Douwes a couple years back in his clinic in Bad Aibling.
The experience was a bit frightening, to say the least. Their methodology to get a diagnosis was basically just examining my medical history followed by a dark field microscopy (i.e. visually checking a blood sample for spirochetes). After that I was diagnosed with late stage lyme and offered two options: a very handwritten prescription (pencil on notepad, w/o doctors signature, not rubberstamped, looking very shady) for herbal ingredients (basically artemisia annua leaves and some roots to brew a tea) - without any tips where to get that from and not really exact dosages given. Option 2: ambulant Hyperthermia + painkillers (to supress pain from the hyperthermia) + a combination of antibiotics (parenteral) for 2 or 3 weeks. Extracting a fortune (20k ballpark)
They also offer hyperthermia treatment for cancer and long covid & me/cfs if I am not mistaken.
The visit really had a smell to it and left me with unease. Look up the group's company network in the Handelsregister and decide for yourself, I got some PE vibes from it. I chickened out and went to someone else, luckily Germany has quite a few private MDs specializing on lyme and other tickborne diseases. What I got in general: most treatments are not evidence based and theres lots of snake oil around, some of the patients are very desparate, me included back then. PS: I made good progress, but am still on meds since. Apparently there's no eradication for late stage lyme. Maybe there are lucky cases, but the slow growth of borrelia spirochetes makes treatment very tedious, much like or even worse than with tuberculosis. I am sure that their treatment actually does help, but it is kind of a hail mary (combo of broad spectrum antibiotics is basically applying blunt force).
Do you drink coffee?
I've had a reckoning with my caffeine metabolism recently. I fall asleep very easily, like head hits pillow and I'm zonked within a minute. But I often wake up at 3 or 4am and am unable to go back asleep.
What I've learned is that caffeine metabolism goes down with age and sleep gets lighter with age. Even if you can fall asleep easily, the residual caffeine in the middle of the night is enough to wake you out of light sleep. I made a tool to convince myself to cut back: http://jitterdone.com
This was my immediate thought. Very small amounts of daily coffee have caused me significant problems with fatigue etc... Takes 1-2 months to get back to feeling good. Strongly urge anyone who feels tired, lack of focus etc to stop all caffeine intake. As with any drug, you're just chasing the initial boost, and really only getting yourself back to baseline.
Yeah. I asked because I had my own heap of problems with caffeine and even with decaf coffee. This thing is a pile of random bioactive substances that are mostly fine for most people until they aren't.
What you could get away with in your twenties doesn't go unpunished once you're around thirty. And what you could get away with around thirty doesn't go unpunished once you're around forty.
yeah, my caffeine issues started around 30. Im nearly 40 and other problems are, indeed, presenting themselves. Young people should, but never will, heed the warnings of old people.
https://lymealert.com/how-it-works/
I’m not optimistic this will be all that helpful. Just because the tick you found is negative, that tells you nothing about those you did not find. Just because a tick is positive, that does not mean that it has infected whoever it was attached to.
My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.
Unfortunately there are a number of tick-borne illnesses. Eg, Powassan virus is a viral infection that attacks the central nervous system (leading to encephalitis). It can be transmitted within hours or even just 15 minutes of tick attachment.
Another is Alpha Gal. It is a molecule carried in tick saliva that can cause serious allergies to red meat and even dairy. Because the molecule is in the saliva, it can be delivered immediately.
I’m not sure we are talking about the same virus, but for the version prevalent in northern europe, there’s a vaccine.
I assume you're thinking of Tick-borne Encephalitis
> My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.
I’ve hear stats as long as 24 hours and as short as 30 seconds. One nurse told me that removing ticks by grasping and pulling means they transmit immediately, because you squeeze their contents through their mouths. I no longer believe any of the stats; seems like it could be at any time.
> you squeeze their contents through their mouths
Whenever someone recommends removal using tweezers, I wonder if the person offering this advice has ever removed a well attached tick. I’ve found tools like a Tick Tornado work better, but are still problematic with smaller ticks.
https://www.zenpetusa.com/tick-tornado
We always covered them with coal-tar ointment (ichthyol / ichthammal) for a few minutes. They detached without a problem after that, with nothing more than a subtle hint from the tweezers.
Just breaking out the tweezers and yanking away was most emphatically not recommended. It can leave the mouth parts behind, if nothing else.
In my experience it works the same way by simply using a drop of dishwashing detergent on them. After 30 seconds max they want to get out with wriggling legs. Works on me after jogging, on my cats, at the back of their neck. Any other place they can take care by themselves, and do.
On dogs my friend likes to strike a match, touch the extinguished tip to the back of the tick, and then pull it out with tweezers. Seems to work
Considering how often dogs in my area were covered with ticks, I am surprised we never got one as teenagers, we were running or biking in the same place.
30+ years ago we would use ether to remove them, and I enjoyed burning them afterwards, it was so satisfying...
Now that you say it...
Makes me wonder of what would happen when you'd use the tips of two blank wires connected to a 1.5V battery?
ZAP!
Could be made into a small USB-gadget, to have it always available? Zaptastick!
I like this. Better: ZapStick!
From experience, you might end up with 2nd degree burns and burn the bugger into a hot crispy pile of ash.
I always carry a tick removal card in my wallet. Perfect removal every time. Even the tiny ones.
The cards I found close to useless. The tools in the link from the parent poster, which are actually for pets, work much, much better.
And tiny ones are easy to remove with finger nails and some spit. But it requires some skill, do not stress out the ticks while they are attached and be careful to not partially remove it.
(Just had to remove 3 ticks on me I failed to spot after a late night walk yesterday, bigger and medium sized ones with tool, the small one with fingernail)
edit: and found a 4th one, but a tiny one(nymphe), they don't carry lyme disease as only ticks who have previously bitten a infected animal before will have it
I've removed several hundred ticks using soap on a wet cloth and doing one counter-clockwise rotation on the tick. No lyme, tick-borne encephalitis so far. Key thing is to check after every hike, keep checking their favorite places (where the skin gets thinner and softer) and check before you scratch something that itches.
Having an easy to use method which doesn't need special tools also helps by being able to immediately remove them.
> Key thing is to check after every hike
There's the common advice to wear long pants & tuck them into socks. But at times I've found the exact opposite: short pants are fine.
Why: ticks can be hard to find on clothing. So you get home, inspect legs etc, and (later) a tick crawls from pants onto your leg & you may not notice.
Bare legs otoh make it trivial to check for ticks regularly during a walk, and/or when you feel something crawling up your leg. Since they're not yet attached then, a flick of your finger & they're off.
Soak your pants socks and shoes in permethrin and this isn’t a problem.
Just be careful doing this if you have cats as pets.
I don’t have cats but from what I’ve read, you just need to keep them away from it until it dries.
Why the soap? Does it loosen the grip of the tick?
It depends on the disease. Lyme takes many hours, as it must migrate across the tick's gut, but there are others that can transmit in minutes.
Yes, but if you push the tick - it will vomit its gut into you.
“Lyme coinfections”, for anyone seeking a list.
This is very helpful for determining if prophylactic treatment is necessary after discovering a tick.
If someone doesn’t notice a tick then they aren’t going to be considering prophylactic treatment anyway. It’s for the cases where ticks are discovered.
According to the dutch public health institute, the longer the tick is in the body, the bigger the chance of transmission. Early removal also does not prevent lyme, it just reduces the chances.
Next to that, in The Netherlands we have a site to report tick bites and if they had lyme disease or not. It’s good to know if you should be extra vigilant after a bite from a certain area. I think the self-test could be very useful for such sites.
Upstate New York has a site for testing and reporting / tracking. Costs are $80 USD for a comprehensive test though. It looks like they'll test just for Lyme for $20, but if you found a tick on you I imagine you'll want to know all the diseases it has potentially given you. At least I did.
https://nyticks.org/
A site to report tick bytes.
Is there a similar site to report mosquito bites? They also carry many debilitation or fatal diseases.
I live in prime tick country. During peak season (March through June and again September through November) I can get 3 or 4 tick bites a day. I don't always get them all because they're completely painless while they're embedded (although I react strongly after they've been removed) and I've been diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease twice after developing all the classic symptoms. I am not alone in my area. If there was a site where you report tick bites here it would need to be pretty robust to handle the load and it would serve no purpose.
The local authorities have acknowledged the rampant outbreak of Lyme in the region. You do not need to provide the tick to authorities for identification. All you need to do is go to any pharmacy and tell them you've been bitten by a tick and they'll write you a prescription for Doxycycline on the spot.
That must do wonders for antibiotic resistance.
I think it's super helpful. Sure it doesn't help with ticks, you don't find, but in my experience it starts to itch eventually even with the tick attached. If it's negative good, if it's positive go see a doctor.
This is one of the things that is oft repeated by my vector disease colleagues -- your infection may not be caused by the tick you found, but by the tick you didn't.
Do ticks commonly detach on their own before being noticed? Because from what I’ve seen of fully engorged ticks I don’t think I would fail to discover that. Or maybe an earlier stage where they’re smaller?
I always thought that too. I spend a lot of time outside and check rigorously. Very often I find a recently attached tick. Found a fully-engorged deer tick half-detached not too long ago - pulled it off jaw-intact. In treatment for early-mid stage disseminated Lyme again, for the third time. Certainly a hidden tax one pays living in New England...I've recently put a lot more effort into things like permethrin.
From what I understand, you're spot on with your last note. Larval stage can be extremely hard to see even when fully engorged. Adult-stage ticks (at least Deer Ticks) are the size of a large grain of cooked brown rice. I've seen fully engorged nymph-stage that rival the size of a grape...
I’ve been fortunate that all the ticks I’ve found on myself I discovered before they began feeding because I am very hairy and they tickled my hairs on my legs as they made their way up.
One other I found crawling up my white tshirt. Good reminder to wear light colored clothes when you’re out where ticks are.
As everyone is different, there is no "best" method to remove one however there's lots of wrong ways. The only thing everyone agrees with is sooner is always better. I'm surprised "laser tick remover" isn't a thing yet.
there have been times in my life where this could have saved me a doctors visit, and that's good enough for me
You went to a doctor because you had a tick, or because you had symptoms? (like the red ring)
for a prophylactic dose of antibiotics after having a tick latched for an unknown amount of time
the US gets a persistent amount of emergency room visits for this sort of treatment (tens of thousands annually), and with all the news about increased tick and lyme exposure a larger number of people treat it preemptively, especially with children
Hm, that approach would have me at the doctor every second day and being on antibiotic all the time. I am outdoors a lot and had 5 ticks on me just today after not checking enough last night after being outside.
I only would consider antibiotics if the red ring appears. In general I suppose I already have resistance .. or the disease slumbering in my body.
Same. I've found engorged ticks a half dozen times in my life. Never had the red ring and never had antibiotics for it. I've got hypothyroidism (genetic) and some mental health issues, but I am otherwise healthy and run 15 miles a week.
I really don't believe that the vague long term symptoms a lot of people are describing in this thread are from ticks, especially people who don't spend much time outside in lyme endemic regions. Lyme has become a favorite label for quacks to describe the fatigue/pain syndrome that is sometimes called fibromyalgia. We don't really know what causes it (and it's probably not ticks), and taking high dose doxycycline for months is not the answer, other than maybe as a placebo.
I think you need to stop overthinking. Yes it can make you sick, but the only thing you can do is be on the lookout for it and be smart about avoiding it. I've had around 4-5 ticks in the last years, my kids and family probably around 15-20, one recently near my ankle that probably could've been avoided if I wasn't wearing short trousers. But anyway nobody ever got sick from it and we live in a region with a high prevalence of tick caused encephalitis. There's a vaccine for that so we're all vaccinated now.
Otherwise just enjoy your life.
> My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged
This understanding will age like milk.
I always keep doxycyline around take a couple whenever I find a deer tick on me.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545493/table/rc1121.ap...
You're the smart one.. Unfortunately I didn't find the tick on time and have been sick with persistent Lyme for over 10 years. Hoping for some kind of solution soon.
Controlled hyperthermia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwtPtlcNXEs
Did you ever see a tick?
Does it matter at this point?
The “no, never saw a tick” anecdotes help support the obvious concept that a bullseye rash is not required to end up with chronic Lyme.
(nor is a tick required!)
And it's relatively easy to get a prescription for since it's a PEP drug for high -er risk sexual activities.
While this at-home test kit is neat, there already are solutions to this problem which are likely more beneficial to the overall awareness of tick-borne illness. In the US, one can send a tick (alive, dead, in shreds) to Penn State’s tick research lab via usps and get results in just a few days. Customers can select what results they’re looking for, as ticks don’t solely carry one “lyme disease” marker.
I would feel better sending a tick that i pulled off of myself or my pets to a dedicated research lab rather than buy some one-off test kits which don’t contribute to the overall incidence rate of tick-borne illness.
I even sent a tick that I found in a potted plant from home depot (never attached to me) which turned out to carry rocky mountain spotted fever. I only sent that random tick in just to see if it carried anything, and since seeing the report from Penn State Ive wondered if i had contracted RMSF what my medical journey would have looked like, since i live on the opposite side of the continent from those ticks and i had found it mid-December. That would have required a Gregory House differential diagnosis where I live.
"LymeAlert seeks to help people avoid the cost and the wait of going to the emergency room after being bitten by a tick"
I might be mistaken, but I don't think you should go to the emergency room with a tick bite..? Do people really do that?
Do you need to? Probably not.
However it is somewhat area specific and Massachusetts is a hotbed when it comes to lyme disease carrying ticks. Lyme really should be treated right away.
I think urgent care wouldn't really be out of the question for a tick bite there. Telehealth is also something that likely could work here. It should be a 5 minute "Hey, got a tick bite, here's the picture of the tick, can I get a prescription for some antibiotics".
Again, I don't think you should be given antibiotics for a tick bite, unless you start showing symptoms, namely the infamous erythema migrans? Most ticks don't carry lyme.
It's region dependent and most people aren't commonly getting ticks in the first place.
The reason to bias towards earlier treatment is because lyme disease can potentially result in nerve damage. For something that's already uncommon (a tick bite) throwing antibiotics at it isn't a terrible thing. Especially because that's also the general treatment for a number of tick born illnesses which don't have the obvious "bullseye".
I get the "we shouldn't needlessly take antibiotics" wisdom. But that's more about common ailments and situations where they aren't needed and don't help. Like, if you have a sore throat you shouldn't immediately get antibiotics.
I like that it involves grinding up the tick. Just deserts.
I don't mind there being some selection pressure against biting humans.
At the same time no tick that I’ve ever removed from a person survived, even without testing it for anything.
I don’t think anyone removes a tick and sets it on its merry way.
Ticks are extremely tough to kill, compared with the myth that some people hold that they can only be drowned (you can obliterate them pretty well with a rock) I'm pretty sure many return to the wild unscathed.
And some even just pull them off and squish them a bit and then throw them down the toilet, bin, outside. Those very likely survive for a new bite.
I usually trap it between two pieces of tape and then put it in a plastic bag and keep it in the freezer for a few weeks in case someone gets sick and I might need it as a sample.
I have no idea if that is actually necessary, but it's easy and I think that probably kills it.
For me, vigorous exercise, riding my bike, running, jumping rope, has always made me feel better mentally and physically whether it was a pathogen funk or just life and feeling down or symptomatic as some describe below. I always check my kids and myself after hikes, especially in tall grass or shrubs. I've found ticks here and there over the years. The cathartic effect of high-intensity exercise where you push yourself to what you think is your limit is amazing for your physical and mental well being. The old Sufi saying, "Movement is life; stillness is death" is my mantra. I have friends who avoid hiking for fear of ticks and Lyme disease. It's a shame, since being outdoors in the sun, smelling the woods, and taking in the views while walking are priceless. Movement over pharmaceuticals.
Start thinking about α-gal syndrome, even if you're in The North. I just pulled an adult Lone Star tick off my back last night. I had no idea that they had made it to Northern Illinois. Now I get to spend the summer waiting to see if a burger is going to kill me.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/alpha-gal
My pet theory is that lyme disease coevolved to make mamals "addicted" to ticks. Every reinfection and the resulting fever-body pyrolysis, resets the infections malaise sideffects for a while. Thus, if you where outside all the time, you would be conditioned to expose yourselfs to ticks all the time, to feel "healthy" again. If those little bastards secreted fentanyl it would have a similar outcome.
Fancy! One can buy a pack of 3 for 30€ in Germany, which detect multiple types of borrelia bacteria ...
Pfizer recently released that they’re planning to send in their new Lyme vaccine to regulatory authorities after their phase 3 study: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Anyone tried ivermectin?
it's good to have test for Lyme in case of strange symptoms (joint pain etc.) but check for alpha-tryptasemia which is more probable (5% people have it).
How effective do you think this test will be?
Is the reactive strip used in the kit an existing, well-proven product?
Growing up in the UK, I never thought about ticks, ever. I then moved to Poland, and remember thinking the Poles were crazy for worrying about tall grass all the time. It was a huge 'wtf are you doing lol?' moment... Then a friend of a friend got fucked over by Lyme disease.
Now I've developed a case of Polish paranoia and tuck my trousers in socks, even if it's 35 degs :/
We stopped burning grass and got ticks infestation. I used work and play in tall grass as a 7 year old in my grapa farm. Never got a tick. 30 years later I found 7 ticks on my cloths after 2 hours walk on the same farm.
We are giving our dog Fluralaner/Bravecto[1] against ticks which paralyzes and kills them when they bite, drastically reducing potential exposure to Lyme disease. Unfortunately not approved for humans and therefore an interesting inverse: humans can get vaccinated against TBEV but not against Lyme disease whereas dogs can get vaccinated against Lyme disease but not TBEV.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluralaner
The problem is the ticks you don’t find.
It might be irrational but ticks terrify me (grew up in the Northwest where they aren’t so much a thing) and make me want to avoid moving to the East entirely
TLDR: A startup called LymeAlert is launching a $40 at-home test (August 2026) that tells you in 15 minutes whether a tick carries Lyme disease. You grind the tick in a container, insert a chemical strip, and it changes color if Lyme bacteria are present. Founded by an MIT Sloan MBA / physician assistant who wanted to save people the $50–$450 and week-long wait of lab testing. Caveat: it only detects Lyme (not other tick-borne infections like Alpha-gal), though a multi-pathogen version is planned for next year. They're also building a smartphone app to crowdsource infected-tick locations.
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Nah. The surrounding conversation here is an absolutely beautiful example of why people shouldn’t be able to take whatever they want, whenever they want.
The facebook/youtube grade quackery is everywhere.
There's a big difference of telling OTHER PEOPLE what drugs and stuff to do, and CHOOSING FOR YOURSELF.
Call it quackery, or whatever other name. I do not trust the medical establishment. Most don't even follow scientific guidelines for treatment. They're lucky to even read the old MR. Usually its for 'cover my ass' reasons, and not correlating treatment.
I've even known women friends who had doctors say "oh its hysteria", or "lose weight", for a variety of issues. And when they go to a decent doc, its correctly identified as endometriosis. And of course the shit docs won't tell you they're shit. They have your money already. And insurance sees "doctor visit" so any others are out of pocket.
So yeah, I do my own research. I pay for my own tests. You can contact cheap labs out of country for a variety of tests.
And in the end, I'm capable of treating myself, either with the drugs, or synthesizing it myself. I don't need your or anybody's permission.
I see both points of view. In capitalism, it is government's job to compensate for negative externalities. Government restricted common people from making voluntary contracts with antibiotic manufacturers because of antibiotic resistance, but that creates a new negative externality of preventing people from healing themselves cost-effectively. So government should be providing the doctors for nearly-free so people can still get treatment.
Unregulated use of antibiotics has negative consequences for the rest of society, in that it promotes antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. Many people try to take antibiotics (and pressure doctors for prescriptions) for likely viral infections where there's no chance of them working. Most people aren't great with attention to detail (qv: you misspelled both antibiotic names) and won't finish a course of antibiotics if symptoms fade even when they're explicitly instructed to do so (which, again, is important for avoiding the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains).
The regulation occurs for a damn good reason.
Also, please don't advertise here.
No, well the point was that noise, chorus, or feedback did not exist. There was no such thing. Therefore, the technical workaround was to place two amplifiers, face to face in order to "mimic" distortion.
This is the way that "Loveless" (1991) was recorded, sans anesthesia.
Wrong thread?
How about loosening restrictions on deer hunting as part of the policy change to reduce deer populations and, consequently, tick populations, that Governor Healey grandstanded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spoke passionately about earlier this year
In Czechia, one of the most infested places are city parks where people walk their dogs. Lots of people, too, so the chances of transmission are high. I don't think that a pet hunting season would pass the Parliament, though :)
Maybe some sort of biological control should be introduced instead. Guinea fowl on steroids.
If we allow ourselves a bit of science fiction, a drone flying over tall grass and burning every questing tick with laser would likely reduce the populations as well. A questing tick sits on the end of a blade of grass, waiting for a host; as such, it is necessarily visible.
and the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels, as well as that you have to kill basically all deer to the point of about 8 deer per square mile, since one deer can carry 2000-3000 new ticks. which is basically impossible on mainland because new deer just wander over.
I'm thinking reverse gene drive? Keep the animals and destroy the pests. Also let's do that for screw worms.
We DID, for screwworms.
The fucking republicans got rid of it, calling it "watching flies have sex".
Now, republicans and DOGE fucked around. Now, Texas and southern states are going to find out.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/doge-slashed-usda-staffing...
I wasn't making a scientific statement about whether depopulating the deer will help; the governor of Massachusetts already did. I'm saying that it's pathetic to blame it all on deer and then not eliminate the pointlessly onerous burden on culling their population.
But since you're being needlessly snarky about it (it's not productive to suggest killing "the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels"), here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25118409/
>After hunts were initiated, number and frequency of deer observations in the community were greatly reduced as were resident-reported cases of Lyme disease. Number of resident-reported cases of Lyme disease per 100 households was strongly correlated to deer density in the community. Reducing deer density to 5.1 deer per square kilometer resulted in a 76% reduction in tick abundance, 70% reduction in the entomological risk index, and 80% reduction in resident-reported cases of Lyme disease in the community from before to after a hunt was initiated.
As I said - on mainland. That study was done on a peninsula community surrounded by water, except on the north side, which was mostly a nature preserve where a 6 foot high fence on that side prevented new deer from entering.
So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.
Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.
And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.
In many places, you need to add lizards to that list.