If Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter was misdiagnosed for 14 years, despite having a disabling case of Lyme Disease, spending summers on Nantucket (where Lyme Disease exposure and awareness are very high) and having all the resources and top doctors at her disposal, imagine how many others with Lyme are also misdiagnosed!
Like Ally Hilfiger, I lived in high exposure areas — including spending summers on Nantucket. I also went to top doctors and I was misdiagnosed for 11 years, before educating myself and asking my doctor to order a high-tech sensitive Lyme test (called PCR & Southern Dot Blot) which was positive. Previous to that, I had only been given CDC’s extremely unreliable test which was always negative for me. CDC claims on its website that its test is virtually 100% sensitive, but all the published peer reviewed science begs to differ, finding approximately 48% sensitivity — meaning 52% of people with Lyme receive false negatives on CDC’s test. This means that somewhere in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year receive false negatives on their Lyme tests and are told by their doctors they do not have Lyme.
— Justin Reilly is a lawyer and senior producer at Forgotten Plague