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Supporting Your Practice View From The Chairside

View from the Chairside: The Implications of Lyme Disease on Dental Treatment

Lyme disease Tick

In this edition of View from the Chairside, frequent CDA Oasis contributor and Calgary-based GP dentist, Dr. Tom Shackleton, Dr. Thomas Shackletonreturns to talk about Lyme disease and its implication on the dental practice.

During this presentation, Dr. Shackleton talks about:

  • What Lyme disease is and what causes it.
  • Why Lyme disease matters to dentists.
  • If dentists can (and should) provide oral health treatments to patients with Lyme disease.
  • Characteristics and symptoms of the disease.
  • How it is transmitted from insects (ticks) to humans including the incubation period.
  • Diagnosing and treating Lyme disease.
  • Facts and myths about treatment, transmission, and vertical transmission that dentists and patients need to know.

We want to hear from you!

Leave a comment about this post in the box below, send your feedback by email or call us at 1-855-716-2747.

Until next time!

CDA Oasis Team

Additional reading

Read/download the transcript of the conversation (PDF)

Oasis Moment/Preview (1″)

Full Conversation (13.01″)

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3 Comments

  1. Rob Murray [DDS retd] September 25, 2019

    “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” – Richard Feynman

    Thanks for your article on this ignored epidemic -and yes Lyme is real and there is much more to this story than the much over-emphasized rash which is the end point for infectious disease doctors. I hope you keep up your interest in Lyme and tick-borne diseases [TBD’s]. They will show up more frequently in the dental office and I have seen one neurologic case that mimicked endodontic pain. I live in the Canadian epicentre and travelled south of the border to be diagnosed and treated. It is difficult to understand at first is that the evidenced based medicine these self-appointed medical experts are talking about is mostly their own expert opinion. There is more to evidenced-based then getting together with your buddies on a Friday night over a case of beer and agreeing how things work.

    The E.R. doctor at Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital estimates that 25%-30% of the patients they see there daily are for Lyme and TBD related problems. The rates in the southern end of Nova Scotia are 2,210/ 100,000 population based on revised estimates. This makes it more common in Nova Scotia than all are other reportable infectious diseases combined There are 2 other dentists besides myself in this small community that have been diagnosed and treated for Lyme. Dr. K. and his wife Cathy [dental hygienist] have been bitten repeatedly and keep asking “how can they [public health & Infectious Disease] get away with it?” Who gets to decide what is evidence? The material you quote is from the ALDF which is a front organization for the International Disease Society of America [IDSA] -a 11,000 member private organization that was given control of Lyme disease and all the processes around it by the heavily conflicted CDC. The CDC has downplayed and trivialized this disease from the start just as they did with HIV/ AIDS.

    Lyme is a multi-staged, multi-system disease and is the infectious disease equivalent of cancer. This is a shape shifting stealth pathogen that can hide in immune protected locations in our brain, inside cells and tight connective tissue. It hates our fluids and gets out of the blood as quickly as possible. It produces antibiotic tolerant persister cells and we now think we have an explanation for the pain and suffering they cause as the bodies immune system continuously tries and fails to remove them. Rhesus macaqes make good stand-ins for people but medicine is self-regulating and infectious disease doctors refuse to accept the results from any animal experiments. There are 13,324 articles in the PubMed data base on Lyme. Only about 200 of these support the CDC, IDSA and their puppet, the lobby group Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease [AMMI] Canada’s position on Lyme.

    In 1995 the insurance industry red-flagged this as being too expensive to treat and got together with 7 doctors who study the disease but don’t treat patients. They agreed to misclassify Lyme as a minor nuisance disease requiring no more than 21 – 28 days of treatment with a single bacterostatic agent despite the stage of the patients disease. They set the bar too high and defined the test too narrowly so that few can cross. Lyme is the 21st Century plague that became too expensive for insurance companies to treat with unacceptable testing, inadequate treatment, lack of medical training and absolutely no disease control; a public health disaster. These doctors are paid as expert witnesses for insurance companies in court cases used to decline medical bills and long-term disability payments. Today most developments in medicine are based on shareholder values and shareholders are interested in treatments, not cures. New antibiotics and vaccines take too long to develop and cost too much.

    One person was told that he was the 9th person from this small [2,000] community in the pharmacy on a Saturday morning for a doxycycline prescription for Lyme. Dr. ‘X’ diagnosed 8 Lyme patients on Wednesday morning, August 14. This doctor himself had been treated for Lyme carditis 3 years previously.

    Infectious disease doctors have abandoned their general practitioner colleagues. I hope you will at least watch this YouTube video from renowned cancer researcher, Dr. Neil Spector where he nails infectious disease people between the eyes. How to Hack Lyme 101, Lyme Innovation, Flash talk, Dr. Neil Spector, YouTube 16-05-31: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1AmztGOvnk&t=837s length 16:16

    Reply
  2. Vasant Ramlaggan September 25, 2019

    Thanks for the transcript! It made for fast and effective understanding of the article. Thanks for the great information Dr. Shackleton!

    Reply
  3. Dr. Rob Murray February 28, 2021

    It took an endodontist from Brazil, not familiar with the Lyme debacle, to point out that this is a disease of consequence and shouldn’t be disrespected by dentists.
    Neuropathy Mimicking Dental Pain in a Patient Diagnosed with Lyme Disease, Mello I, Peters J, Lee C, J Endod 46[9]: p1337-1339; 20-06-17:
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joen.2020.06.011
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32562700/

    Why dental professionals should know about the signs and symptoms of Lyme disease, Bell C, Dal News 21-02-19: https://www.dal.ca/news/2021/02/19/-why-dental-professionals-should-know-about-the-signs-and-sympto.html

    Lyme disease has been framed as an illness that is easy to diagnose, easy to treat, easy to cure. It’s none of those things. Lyme disease, a multisystem, multistaged disease, the equivallent of cancer. It is caused by certain species of spirochetes from Borrelia burgdorferi [Bb] sensu lato complex, is an incredibly controversial medical phenomenon that affects millions of people in the northern hemisphere in many different ways. It is an infectious zoonotic disease that can usually be successfully cured by antibiotic therapy at the very early stages of infection, targeting the replicative forms of spirochetes.
    Lyme is the 2nd great imitator. Specialist have all seen it and most have failed to recognize it particularly in the late chronic/persistent state where it can mimic, or may actually be ALS, Alzheimer’s, MS, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue [ME] etc. Dentists should be familiar with how varied the presenting symptoms can be and how to prevent the disease. Here In the Western Zone of Nova Scotia we are leading the world with an estimated 3,204/100,000 population so we should be keeping this in mind particularly when the symptoms don’t make sense. The serology is abysmal and is what got s into all this trouble. it should be scraped.
    Symptoms: http://canlyme.com/lyme-basics/symptoms/
    Prevention: https://www.canlyme.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NS_Lyme_Prevention.pdf

    Reply

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