For those who aren't looking to use the Lyme hammer to explain and treat everything that can't be explained by conventional diagnosis, Lyme disease is well understood. The standard antibiotic therapy is very effective at stopping the infection. If treatment is delayed too long, there are lingering symptoms that are difficult to treat. There is no evidence that IV antibiotic therapy for years at a time provides any benefit and much evidence that it harms patients. People haven't lost their medical licenses for prescribing such therapy because of some great conspiracy. People have lost their licenses for administering treatments that clearly harm their patients without any benefit while charging large amounts of money for it. It's quackery.
I think that, via my friend's commentary and links and whatnot, I've encountered a fair amount of:
If treatment is delayed too long, there are lingering symptoms that are difficult to treat.
Nonetheless, the experiences do seem to present a nightmare that includes fighting incorrect diagnosis and lack of support, including from insurance.
I didn't read the full OP article, but I heard a fair fraction of the same subject's interview on "The People's Pharmacy", this past weekend. He is a doctor, and still he went through years of misdiagnosis and chronic, horrible symptoms.
I'm also mindful that while people including the medical community are now becoming more cognizant of Lyme disease and its details, for years this was not the case.
Finally, I guess we should note that, between this article, the interview I mention, the book he's written... this also represents a PR push surrounding the book.
P.S. I guess I can add that I have a family member who acquired a parasitic infection (not Lyme disease) abroad that was not properly diagnosed and treated for 3+ years. (Despite extensive attempt to find an effective diagnosis and treatment including some very prominent clinics.)
The correct treatment, once administered, immediately knocked out the parasite. However, so much damage had been done by it in the meantime that recovery proved to be very long and ultimately incomplete.
This anecdote doesn't make me any righter about Lyme disease, and certainly IANAD. But I have, second hand, experienced something similar with regard to such... "runaround".
It's not a fallacy. Absence of evidence really is evidence of absence. The fallacy version is "absence of proof is proof of absence".
It is a sad state of affairs when doctor's are restricted from making medical decisions in the best judgement of their patients because of uninvolved bureaucracy.
Understand that doctors have been disbarred and prosecuted for pursuing Lyme treatments that go "off protocol", even when the patient is clearly still sick and when they are carefully pursuing the best understanding and treatment they can obtain.
Insurance companies refuse to pay for treatment, and "mainstream" medical practitioners with little or limited understanding refuse to pursue further treatment. For example, testing for Lyme infection is tricky, unreliable, and multi-stage. However, a doctor will administer one test in the initial stage. When it comes back negative, they declare "Well, you can't have Lyme disease." While in reality such a negative result is far from conclusive.
Good luck, then or at all, getting your insurance company to pay for further treatment. And, most of us have insurance because we don't have enormous liquid reserves to pursue such things independently.
In other cases, a diagnosis is made and a single course of treatment pursued. The doctor considers one such course of treatment to be 100% effective. For patients who continue to have symptoms -- and it's now well-known that Lyme presents chronic cases that are highly resistant to treatment -- they are told that, following such a treatment, "it can't be Lyme disease."
Some recent reporting I heard had an expert estimate that with the U.S. government (i.e. the CDC et al.) finally considering a re-interpretation of their identification of Lyme disease, the number of cases formally identified may increase ten-fold.
So... there really is something to wishing that the government would take this disease more seriously.
And... I wish more medical professionals would drop the "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" fallacy. So often, "certainty" proves over the long term to be anything but, in the field. Remember when they were telling us to switch to (partially hydrogenated) margarine? Or to forgo all fat? Sodium? Coffee?...