treatment question

[elibob]

My son had a bullseye rash about a month ago. We took him to the doctor and he prescribed amoxicillin 2x/day for 10 days. Yesterday my friend's son had the same rash and his doctor prescribed him amoxicillin 3x/day and said it had to be AT LEAST 14 days for lyme treatment. I looked online and that is what I found also. I am concerned my son was not on antibiotics long enough and that symptoms will show up later when it is harder to treat. Should I call the doctor back and try to get him on another 14 days of treatment or would that be too late at this point? Please any advice would be appreciated.

[Ricobord]

Your concerns are valid.  In real life, the usual three weeks of doxycycline (for older kids & adults) has about a 10-15% failure rate, which is unacceptable given how bad Lyme can get. 10 days is definitely not enough, which shows your doctor's information is very out of date. Even the IDSA says 2-4 weeks.  Docs who know Lyme well say 4-8 weeks.

I had 7 days of Augmentin 875 when I had a flu-like onset It is a strong penicillin, and it was insufficient.  It made me much better at the time, but I didn't figure out I had Lyme until I was really sick 5-6 years later.

[JackieCalifornia]

PS Co-infections, if your son has one or more of them, may not respond to these particular antibiotics, but treating the Lyme quickly is definitely a good thing.

[youvegottobekidding]

Generally, if you are within the 6 week time period from the bite, you can eliminate lyme using doxycycline. You need 8 weeks continuous treatment, less than this is not enough.
Is your son under 8 years old? That would be the only reason for not using doxy. It would be ideal to take a herb called atemisia at well for the same period of time.
Amoxy is not very powerful against lyme, it certainly does not work without other antibiotics taken together. The usualy treatmetn for kids under 8 is cefuroxim twice daily (high dose proprtional to body weight) plus azithromycin 3 times a week.

So long as you act within 6 weeks of the bite he should be fine. Once you are past that stage, it could be harder to cure and I personally would raise heaven and earth to get my son on the right antibiotics before it gets to that.

If you go to
www dot ilads dot org
You can print out the treatment guideline for lyme.

There are 2 schools of thought and Ilads has details of both approaches to treatment - the IDSA one (which many of us here, to our cost, have found out are not enough) and the Ilads ones.

[JackieCalifornia]

Yes, I would take my child to be treated further.

The problem is that your current doc certainly believes that s/he has done what is appropriate, and getting them to prescribe something you read about online is difficult at best.  

Amoxicillin may or may not be the right medication against Lyme, and there is also the concern that maybe half of ticks carrying Lyme also carry other diseases that are not treatable by the same meds that Lyme is.

You could try going to your friend's doc; maybe you'll get some better advice.  But also read up (ILADS dot org, see the treatment guidelines) and generally look around for information on current treatments.  

There are a fair number of wackos out there in the Lyme world, and also well meaning but not not well informed people, so you'll have to educate yourself to know what the right thing to do is.  It's a developing area of medicine, so there are many opinions and lots of self-righteous docs who don't understand what they don't understand, so you're venturing into a whole new world.  Welcome:  there are lots of us out here.

I'm not medically trained, but I am not sure that amoxicillin is effective in Lyme.  Doxycycline is sometimes used, but my Lyme doc didn't use it.

It's never too late to treat Lyme.  It's a nasty disease, and going after it early and hard is the right thing to do.  And don't forget those possible co-infections.

Finding a Lyme-literate doc (we patients call them LLMDs, Lyme-literate MDs, for shorthand, but it's not an official title, and no doc calls him/herself an LLMD) is the first trick.  Then tally ho against the infection(s).

Let us know if we can help.  Good for you for being vigilant.