IDSA 2006 Lyme Disease Treatment Guidelines Removed From National Guideline Clearinghouse

The old Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) guidelines have been removed from the National Guideline Clearinghouse. They never did comply with the Institute of Medicine’s standards for developing trustworthy clinical practice guidelines or with the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) standard for rating evidence and recommendations.

In 2006, shortly after the IDSA guidelines were published, the Attorney General of Connecticut filed an antitrust investigation. The IDSA agreed to review its guidelines, and eventually released its findings in 2010. They recommended 25 changes to the guidelines, but never implemented them, and told the NGC that there was no need to change the guidelines.

For more historical information, click here for an article[1] by Lorraine Johnson, JD – a long-time advocate for and supporter of adequate treatment of patients with Lyme disease, and one of the authors of the ILADS (the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) guidelines, now currently the only guidelines for treatment of Lyme disease on the NGC clearinghouse website.

Your insurance companies have been using those outdated and unsupported IDSA guidelines ever since, and mostly have denied antibiotic coverage for more than a short period of time for persistent symptoms compatible with Lyme disease, as recommended in the ILADS guidelines.

Now you have another reason to re-open the discussion with your insurance company. If you have been diagnosed with Lyme disease – whether by CDC criteria, IGeneX criteria or simply by clinical criteria, the ILADS guidelines are the only accepted national guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease – whether acute or long-term “chronic”.

For more information about Lyme disease, click here. For information about Lyme literate doctors in your area, click here.

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