Posted by bleauberry on May 3, 2018, at 11:09:33
In reply to Lets play with numbers. » bleauberry, posted by SLS on May 2, 2018, at 22:50:53
Scott I would suggest you write a book, news article, or blog post, to make the case that lyme is not much associated with psychiatry. That seems to be where your passion is. I believe working passions is a healthy good thing. Make the case that any treatment resistant patients thinking about a 2nd opinion with an LLMD are wasting their time. Make that case in a book. You are showing a great deal of passion for such a book.
> Bleauberry.
>
> You have been told by your physicians that 9 out of 10 (90%) people presenting with depression will actually have Lyme Disease.
>
> > I have my own estimate of the number of lyme cases in USA. It is 10X whatever we think it is.
>
> Nice non-answer. How much do "we" think it is?
>
> Let's try another experiment. We need to come up with a value representing the number of people in the USA who are walking around with Lyme Disease. 33,000 cases are reported to the CDC each year. However, they estimated that the true number is 10 times higher than this = 329,000. If you were to multiply this number by another 10, we get 3,290,000. Still, this would yield a much lower number than the 90% number you keep touting. For every 100 cases of depression, 8 would have Lyme = 8%. That's still a very big number - certainly bigger than the 7 out of 1000 (0.740%) that results when you use the CDC estimate.
>
> Okay - just for kicks:
>
> To get to 90%, you would have to multiply the CDC estimate by a factor of 110.
>
> That's 110x !
>
> By the way, such a number would imply that 1 in 10 people in the USA are walking around with Lyme Disease.
>
> Does this sound reasonable to you?
>
> Oh, c'mon, Bleauberry. Smile.
>
> For now, I would have to guess that the prevalence of Lyme Disease among people with depression in the USA is somewhere between 1% and 2%. However, this number will vary greatly regionally. 96% of Lyme cases occur in 14 states.
>
> Connecticut
> Delaware
> Maine
> Maryland
> Massachusetts
> Minnesota
> New Hampshire
> New Jersey
> New York
> Pennsylvania
> Rhode Island
> Vermont
> Virginia
> Wisconsin
>
>
> - Scott
poster:bleauberry
thread:1098387
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20180331/msgs/1098503.html