Vijay Sikand

intense detail.

We drew blood beginning of the season, end of the season, and any time you had an illness that might or might not have been Lyme disease during those two years, we drew your blood again.

I had a photographer helping me with photographing the skin rashes patients came down with, etc.

We had the guy across the road also next to the bakery who had a Photoshop.

And the Photoshop guy, every time I had a patient with a skin rash, he would go out of his way to get the film, develop it overnight, provide a high quality picture for me to then FedEx to the manufacturer.

And so we had the FedEx guy, we had the photo guy, we had the bakery lady bringing in the donuts.

It gave me a sense not only of being a physician in the community, but being a part of it in a unique way.

Everybody talks about the bullseye, but if you have 12 different ways this rash might look, wait a minute, it's not so easy to diagnose.

Sometimes the Lyme rash can appear in ways that we never imagined.

So we had dozens of different rashes.

Anytime a patient in our study had a rash, they'd immediately say, you got to see me, doc.

I've got a rash.

And because we had the resources of the large pharmaceutical company, we biopsied those rashes.

Now, nobody in his right mind, or even if they had a million dollars, would be able to have their patient in their private practice office

have their skin lesion biopsied and sent to a lab.

But we had, we had to prove if it was really Lyme disease or not.

So we did a little biopsy from the edge of all of those skin rashes to see if they could find the Lyme disease bacteria in it.

You would be amazed at half the time there were rashes that I had no idea whether they were Lyme disease or not, that turned out to be Lyme disease.

Which if we hadn't had the study, we would never have known.

We would never have known.