REPORT ON LYME DISEASE 1 UNORTHODOX AND UNVALIDATED LABORATORY TESTS IN THE DIAGNOSIS OF LYME BORRELIOSIS AND IN RELATION TO MEDICALLY UNEXPLAINED SYMPTOMS Professor

Background There has been an increasing trend in recent years for some medical practitioners to make a diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis in patients with a range of serious but nonspecific symptoms based on unorthodox and unvalidated laboratory tests. The consequences of this over-diagnosis included recommendations for a range of potentially hazardous treatments such as prolonged courses of parenteral cephalosporins and other antibiotics and the possibility that other medically significant causes of the patients’ symptoms were being overlooked.