New Standard of Care Guidelines for treating Lyme and other Tick-borne illnesses were just released today from ILADS.

New Standard of Care Guidelines for treating Lyme and other Tick-borne illnesses were just released today from ILADS. They are able to be accessed on line in the August 2014 journal Expert Review of Anti-infective Therapy. These guidelines highlight the need for individualized patient care. As per the lead author, Dr Daniel Cameron: " ILADS is the first organization to issue guidelines on Lyme disease which comply with the standards set by the Institute of Medicine for developing trustworthy protocols. The document provides a rigorous review of the pertinent medical literature and contains recommendations for Lyme disease treatment based on the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) process. This review format is used by other well-respected medical organizations including the Cochrane Collaboration and the World Health Organization. ILADS’ GRADE-based analyses discovered research studies guiding current treatment protocols were of very low quality; and, the regimens based on these randomized controlled trials often failed. “For this reason, we moved away from designating a fixed duration for antibiotic therapy for tick borne illnesses and instead encourage clinicians to tailor therapy based on the patient’s response to treatment,” noted Dr. Cameron. Lorraine Johnson, a co-author of the study also commented: "The guidelines encourage shared medical decision making and taking patient values into consideration". This has certainly been a missing piece in other published guidelines.
guidelines represent years of hard work by Dr Cameron, Dr Maloney and Lorraine Johnson, and I applaud their efforts in getting these important guidelines published.

http://informahealthcare.com/doi/full/10.1586/14787210.2014.940900