The resources you want depend to a certain extent on who you are, but there is no hard and fast rule, so browse the whole section.

If you have been diagnosed with Lyme disease you may need to draw some of this information to the attention of your employer or your doctor.

We are sharing our analysis of some Research Papers as many people do not have easy access to the medical journals where these are published.

On each of the information pages of our website, we provide links to the papers we have used – see the References section at the end of each page. Sometimes those links will provide you with a full copy of the paper but sometimes only the abstract (a summary of the findings) will be openly available. LDA has obtained, and read, the full paper in all cases, but the limitations of copyright mean we cannot make the paper available to everyone.

At some point you may need to delve deeper and look at recently published papers. The main places to find further information are listed on the DIY page.

E – Patients

LDA recognises the increasing importance of the Internet for the education and support of patients.

The following articles support this statement.

UK

Interactive Health Communication Applications for people with chronic disease (IHCAs) PDF (636K)

Summary E Murray, J Burns, Tai S See, R Lai, I Nazareth : Wiley (Oct 2005)

Googling for a diagnosis—use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study Hangwi Tang, Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng, BMJ (Nov 2006)

USA

The first generation of e-patients, Tom Ferguson & Gilles Frydman: BMJ (May 2004)

What I’ve Learned from E-Patients, Dan Hoch & Tom Ferguson: PLoS Medicine (Aug 2005)

Health related virtual communities and electronic support groups: systematic review of the effects of online peer to peer interactions, Gunther Eysenbach et al : BMJ (May 2004)