Separating Fact from Fiction in Lyme Diagnosis and Treatment with Daniel Solomon, MD

Because borrelia burgdorferi is a spirochete; a spiral! A little mnemonic device for the med students.

Dr. Daniel Solomon is an infectious disease doctor on staff at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.  He went to med school at Yale, and then did both residency and fellowship at the Brigham, although fellowship was combined with Mass General, where he was on the HIV Clinician Educator track. 

He is actively involved in improving care at the intersection of injection drug use and infectious diseases, where he integrates addiction treatment and infectious disease care to improve infection and addiction related outcomes.  He also teaches clinical reasoning at Harvard Medical School, and is a course director for the Harvard ID in Primary Care CME course, giving talks on immunizations and Lyme Disease.

We start off talking about the measles outbreak, but the main focus of the talk is Lyme disease and it is chock full of useful information.  We discuss the presentations of primary Lyme, early and late disseminated, the treatment and work-up.  We discuss prevention in light of the fact that we both have 3-year olds that run around outside in Lyme endemic areas.  We end by discussing how the presentation of Lyme can be missed, the symptoms hard to appreciate, and the tests sometimes difficult to interpret, but he helps us parse through all that and we end by differentiating chronic Lyme from post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, one of which is recognized by the CDC and infectious disease community.

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