TIC-Kit Tick Removal and Pre-paid Testing
While at least a few states have now passed bills that allow doctors to treat patients with antibiotics for longer than 30 days if needed. If you live in a tick endemic areas such as the Northeast including New England states of the US, Southwestern US from Florida to Texas, the Upper Mid-West, the Pacific Northwest, California, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. If you live in Canada, the Providences, which border these regions in the US, especially if you have pets.
The TIC-Kit is a great kit that you can use and should have with you especially when living in a tick area and love the outdoors. This will provide you with everything you need to remove a tick except gloves (always carry an extra pair of Nitril gloves in the car or your pack if you are biking or hiking). This TIC-Kit is a new means for testing the tick inexpensively and will test not only for Lyme disease but the four most common pathogens associated with Lyme Disease. The costs $40, which is a bargain because even I-Genix charges $58 per sample. The TIC-Kit is so reliable, my LLND and her staff use these kits. They are also sold in my LLNDs clinic sell them and recommends them to their patients. They are easy to use with instructions for removing the tick you found. For those who spend a lot of time outside and are in areas of the US endemic with ticks, tick removal and preservation kits are now available. You can carry these kits with you in your car or backpack. The awesome thing about the TIC-Kit is all you have to is follow the instructions on the box. I can trust these as my doctor and family use them. The kits test for the following:
- Borrelia species – Borrelia burgdorferi is the common bacterial species causing Lyme disease. It is mostly found in North America, but also exists in Europe. B. burgdorferi was the first microbe shown to cause Lyme disease, displaying the classical Lyme symptoms as the bull’s eye rash. Since then, other sub-strains of Borrelia (B. afzelii, B.garinii, B. sensu stricto) have been identified in the US to cause Lyme disease symptoms. These are also tested in TIC-KIT.
- Bartonella species: Bartonella microbes are transmitted by insects such as ticks, fleas, sand flies, and mosquitoes. B. henselae and B. quintana, the most common ones are included in TIC-KIT.
- Ehrlichia species: Ehrlichia (sometimes called anaplasma) is a genus of rickettsiales bacteria spread by ticks. Several species can cause an infection in humans known as ehrlichiosis. The disease can be mild or life-threatening in severely ill patients with low white blood cell count, low platelet count, anemia, elevated liver enzymes, kidney failure and respiratory insufficiency. Older people or people with suppressed immune systems are more likely to be hospitalized. Deaths occurring from Ehrlichiosis have been reported by the CDC. The most common strains causing Ehrlichiosis tested in the TIC-KIT; Ehrlichiosis – Ehrlichia chaffeensi, E. ewengii, and Anaplasma phagocytophilum.
- Babesia species: Babesia is a parasite of the blood that causes hemolytic (destruction of red blood cell membranes) disease known as babesiosis. The parasite is sometimes associated with Lyme disease. Over 100 species of Babesia have been identified, but only those tested with TIC-KIT (B. microti, B. divergens and the European form Babesia spp. EU) have been documented as harmful in humans.
I have Lyme Disease –Borrelia burgdorferi, but I have also been tested positive for Babesia and Bartonella plus several other infections that commonly present with a compromised immune system. I will be talking more about me, my journey, and the roller coaster ride which many with Lyme disease will experience for the rest of their life, or until a cure is found.
you are amazing i cant bevliee a young lady like you could ever get lymes disease. then agian ticks dont know what the heck theyre doing. you are such an insparation to be thankful for what we have. now when ever i get a cough and sayy it might as well be the end of the world i can remind myself that there are people with worse that some how, by the grace of god perhaps, stays happy and loving. i once was in the hospital for three months and by the end was ready to break down and cry. if i had known about you i would have taken a moment and thought about how lucky i am to only have to stay for three months. i was staying at st josephs hospital, like you, and hey where the nicest people in the world. im glad to have figured out about about lymes disease through this article and your instagram. i am more informed now and will take more care when i have ticks, in some ways i guess ill be mored parinoid too :] thank you for sharing your story!
Thank you Bojan for your comment. I apologise for not responding earlier. For some reason your post ended up in the Spam pile. I appreciate your reading my post and for commenting. If I have made just one person more alert to the the devastation Lyme disease Then I am doing something right. I am so very sorry you were in the hospital for three months. I would have gone crazy. That said all the times during this journey I believe I have you beat. Thankfully this is no contest. But Lyme disease should be taken very serious. While I did, or though I had 15 years ago we did not understand Lyme disease to the degree we do now. And because of that I learned Lyme disease never leaves ones body. Rather, Lyme spirochetes lay dormant in our body until a time of stress and they rear their ugly heads out and break free from their protective sheath and begin invading new areas of the body until they have destroyed the body such that it can no longer be healed and their host dies. That said, this is the worst case scenario. Sadly however, each day someone dies from Lyme disease. It has become a pandemic in many parts of the country and an epidemic in the US and many parts of the world. Everyone needs to be on the look out for ticks when they are in the woods. And for those who like myself, I hope I will again be able to walk and ride my bike through the woods again, I will have a few tick kits with me so that I can send them out for analysis. $20 is hardly a fee to worry about compared to the thousands of dollars it costs to treat someone with Lyme Disease out of pocket. Only to home for remission. There is no cure for Lyme disease. And for anyone to suggest otherwise doesn’t understand the biology behind the disease. There is not cure. Period. Thanks again for your comment. You are too kind. 🙂
I’ve heard about a new ultraviolet machine called the UVLRx that’s being used for Lyme patients. It uses a fiber optic thread which is inserted directly into the vein and the treatment lasts for an hour, so all the blood is treated. Has anyone tried this?
Thanks for your comment and reading my blog post. I have had a similar procedure done where my blood was removed and filtered via UV and hydrogen peroxide, then this blood is returned into my body. It seems to work well on Viral loading not really certain if it helps Lyme disease or not. That said, I went through a week of Herxing. I felt better but it was short lived. I was so sick at the time I had these treatments for six weeks twice a week. Again, I believe it helped kill the various viruses i.e., Shingles finally go away. I haven’t tried it since and that was about two years ago. Not sure if this answers your question or not. Thanks again for reading my blog. I hope you will continue to.