LymeHQ · About
Built by someone who needed it to exist
A platform for an illness whose central problem is that the information is scattered, the tests are misunderstood, and the people who have it are used to not being believed.
01 · The problem
The data exists. Nothing connects it.
Which is how an illness stays contested for decades.
People with tick-borne illness accumulate an enormous amount of information about themselves — symptoms tracked across years, test results from several labs, treatments tried and abandoned, what helped and what did not. Almost none of it is in a form anyone can use. It lives in notebooks, in photographs of lab reports, in memory, and in fragments across clinics that do not talk to each other.
So two things happen at once. In an appointment, the history that would explain everything cannot be told in twelve minutes. And in research, the evidence that could settle the arguments cannot be assembled, because it was never recorded in a shape anything can read.
Lyme is not usually named at the first visit
- A visit that named something else
- The visit that named it
Every one of those visits is time, money, and being told it is something else.
Being somewhere along that row is ordinary, not a personal failure. Keep your own record of dates and symptoms — it is the one thing that travels from one visit to the next.
Seven is an average reported by people already living with persistent symptoms. It describes that group — not everyone who is bitten, and not a prediction for any one person.
Seven clinicians before diagnosis: MyLymeData patient registry, LymeDisease.org. A patient-reported average from people with persistent symptoms, not a clinical rule.
02 · The decisions
Six doors closed on purpose
A list of decisions with reasons is worth more than a list of values.
Each of these made the product smaller. They are written down so they are not re-litigated quietly, and so that anyone who thinks one is wrong can say which one and why.
No doses, anywhere
The treatment reference names drugs and explains why they are used, and carries no doses and no durations at all. Its safety comes from the absence rather than from a disclaimer. It is also why there is no interaction checker — an engine that compares doses has to reintroduce exactly what was taken out, and call it a feature.
Nothing counts consecutive days
A streak has exactly one message for someone who misses a day, and for people whose illness caused the gap, that message is that they failed. Days logged in a window are counted; days in a row are never counted.
Every sharing switch starts off
Not as a well-set default but as the only state the database will create. And all-off is a complete answer — the dashboard shows it as a decision rather than as an incomplete setup, with no fraction, no warning colour and no persuasion beside an off switch.
Where the evidence is thin, we say so
The integrative guide carries no citations. It carries three honest tiers — human studies exist, laboratory only, or reported by patients and unstudied — and explicit language where efficacy has not been shown. Rounding thin evidence up is how this community got hurt in the first place.
Where clinicians disagree, we show the disagreement
Some of this is genuinely contested. Presenting one position as settled would be easier and would make us one more voice telling people what to think. Two columns, equal weight, and your treatment stays a conversation with your own clinician.
Every promise about data maps to a test
A claim we cannot test is a claim we should not make. Each data-handling sentence on this site names the script that proves it, in a comment beside the copy, and the claims that could not be proved were deleted rather than softened.
03 · Who is building it
One person, who has this illness
LymeHQ is patient-built and, at the time of writing, built by one person. That is worth knowing for two opposite reasons. It is why the product understands things a well-resourced team would have to be told — that brain fog makes a dense screen unusable, that a streak counter is a punishment, that being asked to prove you are ill is the default experience and the software should not repeat it. It is also why some of it is unfinished, why the roadmap has no dates on it, and why a reply to an email takes a few days rather than an hour.
Several of these pages were written to be sent to somebody — a relative who does not understand what is happening, or does not believe it. That is a strange design requirement and it shaped the education library more than any other single thing.
What that does not buy
Being built by a patient is a reason to trust the design decisions, not the medical content. Nothing here is written by a clinician, nothing here is medical advice, and the pages that carry clinical content say who has reviewed them — including when the answer, as it is on every one of them today, is nobody yet. That is the point of putting a review state on a page at all.
04 · Where it stands
A demo, and honest about being one
Everything runs. None of it runs on real data.
Every account is synthetic and no real health information is held. The banner at the top of every page says so, and it stays there until that changes. The code is written to production standards deliberately — the intention is that only configuration changes when real accounts arrive, so the protections are not something added later, on a deadline, to a system that was not built for them.
What is built, what is next, and what has been dropped is on the public roadmap. If any of it is wrong, or if a page claims more than it should, hello@lymehq.com.
Where to go next
- The productHow LymeHQ worksThe loop end to end, with each station marked built or not.
- What is nextPublic roadmapIn order, without dates — including what was dropped and why.
- The moneyHow this is fundedWho pays, what that buys them, and the part that is uncomfortable to write down.
- If you are ill nowThe six-step pathThe practical arc, from symptoms to the long haul.