PLEASE HELP Montanans with Lyme disease: Senate Bill 296

I don't feel well enough to be up this late, and I'm too tired to type a separate post, so follow the link below for the post I typed earlier tonight (links and info on the bill and contacting representatives).

Rather than cross post the entire thing, here's the link and a couple of excerpts.

Montana Momma post about SB 296

Montana Senate Bill 296 proposes to protect doctors who treat lyme with long term antibiotics.  Protocols currently call for 28 days of antibiotics early into onset.  But 28 days is not always enough even in the acute stage.  Chronic lyme is very difficult to get diagnosed in this state, as I've posted about before, so the odds of getting diagnosed and treated in the acute phase are pretty slim.  Once diagnosed, longer term cases of lyme cannot be treated as easily as acute cases.

In other parts of the country, even where lyme is known to occur and more commonly diagnosed and treated, doctors have lost their licenses and suffered serious financial consequences for treating patients with lyme.  The risk to doctors and the full complexities of the multiple debates surrounding lyme treatment and diagnosis are too much to dive into here, but a VERY good introduction to these issues is the movie Under Our Skin (it can be rented and is available on netflix and youtube in clips).  

My hope is that reducing the risk associated with treating patients will also reduce the resistance to adequate testing and diagnosis.

You can read the rest of the blog post, including a bit about my 3 years of misdiagnosis (and how better legislation might have helped) and more on Lyme in general on my Lyme blog, Invisibly Lyme Montana.  With the primer moving linked to above and with a little delving, it is clear to any educated reader that the IDSA/CDC diagnosis and treatment guidelines used nationwide are inadequate and dangerous.  What happened to me could happen to anyone.