“Like a human hockey puck”—that’s how Nikki Schultek describes a year spent ricocheting between specialists in Connecticut, each focused on one piece of her deteriorating health—bladder pain, neurological symptoms, joint pain—while missing the whole picture. “I really don’t fault the clinicians,” she told The Epoch Times. “The training hones them to be experts in a domain.” After her odyssey of misdiagnoses, Schultek finally received a correct diagnosis of Lyme disease. However, her experience navigating a fragmented health care system brought her to Washington on Dec. 15, where Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convened a rare federal roundtable addressing what he called long-standing failures in how the disease is diagnosed, studied, and treated. “Lyme disease is an example of a chronic disease that has long been dismissed, with patients receiving inadequate care,” Kennedy said at the event. “I want to announce that the gaslighting of Lyme patients is over.” The Medical Divide Schultek’s story echoes those of many patients whose months—or years—of fatigue, pain, neurological symptoms, and cognitive problems, after undergoing a battery of tests, are eventually traced back to that one tick bite that infected them with Lyme disease. Persistent symptoms from Lyme disease are both […]