Reference · vocabulary

The vocabulary, in plain language

The words you are expected to already know in a clinic, plus the ones this platform uses about itself.

Not knowing the words is a large part of why appointments go badly — you spend the appointment decoding rather than describing. Each entry says what a term means, then why it matters to you. Where the question behind a word is genuinely open, the entry says so instead of picking a side.

Review statePending clinical review

Every clinical definition — the tests and their tiers, the rash and how often it appears, the coinfections, symptoms after treatment — and the two guideline bodies, named. A clinically-informed reviewer has not yet signed this off, and it stays marked until one does.

14 words met in a clinic · 14 words about this platform · 3 open questions · free, no account

The scales mark a term where the question behind it is open rather than settled. Those entries name what is disputed; not one of them picks a side.

Testing

On a request form, or a lab report

Each entry defines a word. What a particular result means for you is a different question and belongs with the clinician treating you — and, for these, with the testing guide, which explains them in the context of an actual report.

Two-tier testing
The standard approach: a first antibody test, then a second confirmatory one. Both look for your immune response rather than for the bacterium itself.Why it matters to you. A single “Lyme test” result is usually only half of it. Which tier you had, and what the second one said, are two separate questions worth asking out loud.
Serology
Any test that looks for antibodies in blood. It measures your response to an infection, which is why timing changes what it can find. "Seronegative" means no antibodies were detected.Why it matters to you. Because it measures your response rather than the organism, when the blood was drawn is part of what the result means. The date of a suspected exposure belongs beside the result, not in your memory.
Western blot
The confirmatory test in the standard pair. It reports antibodies to individual proteins as "bands" — separate markers that are read together rather than individually.Why it matters to you. Which bands were present is a fact about your sample; how many of them count as positive is a rule about counting them. Asking for the full report, bands included, gets you both.
Seroconversion
The moment your antibody levels become high enough to detect. Before it, a test can be negative while an infection is present.Why it matters to you. An early negative can be a fact about timing rather than a fact about you. It is the reason the date of the bite belongs on the request alongside the symptoms.
Reading a test result

The vocabulary specific to a lab report — IgM and IgG, ELISA, Western blot bands, what a negative does and does not rule out — is defined in place on the testing guide, where each term sits beside the thing it describes. It is not repeated here, because a word defined twice is a word that will eventually be defined two ways.

Clinical

Words you are expected to already know

Definitions of terms, never interpretations of results. Nothing here describes anybody’s case, and nothing here names a treatment.

Coinfection
A second organism transmitted by the same tick in the same bite. Different organism, different illness, often different treatment.Why it matters to you. Whether you were tested for Lyme and whether you were tested for anything else are two different questions, and only one of them is usually answered.
Herxheimer reaction
A temporary worsening some people notice after starting or changing treatment. What it means in any individual case is a question for their clinician.Why it matters to you. Feeling worse after a change is worth reporting rather than absorbing quietly. It is also not the only thing that can make someone feel worse, which is why it is a clinician’s call and not a self-diagnosis.Open question — how often it occurs in Lyme, and how to tell it apart from a drug reaction or a relapse.
EM rash
Erythema migrans — the expanding rash sometimes called a bull’s-eye. CDC reports the expanding rash in roughly 70 to 80 percent of people with Lyme disease — so some people never get one — and it is not always a bull’s-eye (Signs and Symptoms of Untreated Lyme Disease, read 25 September 2026).Why it matters to you. Photograph it beside something for scale, and again the next day — growth over days is the tell. A Johns Hopkins study (JAMA Network Open, 12 December 2023) found that Black patients were less likely than white patients to be diagnosed while the rash was the only sign, and the researchers point partly to how the rash looks on darker skin (Johns Hopkins Medicine news release, December 2023, read 7 October 2026).
Vector
The organism that carries an infection between hosts. For Lyme, the tick.Why it matters to you. It is why prevention works on the tick and its habitat rather than on the people around you — the bite is where the chain can be broken.
Nymph
A juvenile tick stage. Small enough to be missed easily.Why it matters to you. Never having found a tick is not evidence that none was attached.
Prophylaxis
Treatment given to prevent an infection rather than to treat a confirmed one. Whether it applies is a clinical judgement.Why it matters to you. It is why “we are treating this” and “you have Lyme” can be two different sentences. One is a precaution; the other is a diagnosis.
PTLDS
Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome — the label used for symptoms that continue after a completed course of standard treatment.Why it matters to you. The symptoms are real and studied. The label on your notes often decides what care is offered next, which is reason enough to know which one you were given.Open question — what causes the symptoms, and what should follow from that.
Persisters and biofilms
Forms of the bacterium seen in the laboratory that survive antibiotics. Whether they occur in people, and whether they explain symptoms that persist, is not settled.Why it matters to you. You will meet this cited with great confidence in both directions. The immune-system guide lays out the positions without choosing between them, which is the honest state of it.Open question — whether what is seen in the laboratory happens in people at all.
Alpha-gal syndrome
A delayed allergy to mammalian meat that can follow a lone star tick bite. Reactions arrive hours after eating rather than immediately.Why it matters to you. The delay is why it goes unrecognised for years — the meal and the reaction do not look connected. If it applies to you it belongs on anything you hand a clinician.

Guidelines

The published guidelines

Two bodies publish Lyme guidelines. This site says who they are and where to read them, and does not choose between them, here or anywhere else.

IDSA and ILADS
Two professional bodies that publish Lyme guidelines: the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), with the American Academy of Neurology and the American College of Rheumatology (2020), and the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS, 2014). What each recommends is in its own document; the Common ground page links both and says what each covers.Why it matters to you. Which guideline your clinician works from, and where they depart from it, tells you more about what will be offered than any search result will.

Platform

Words we use about the software

No clinical content — these describe how the system works. They appear on the pages about how LymeHQ handles data, and they are here so nobody has to infer them from context on a page about their own health record.

Row-level security
A rule attached to a table rather than to the code that reads it. It decides which rows a given person can see, so a query that forgets to filter returns nothing rather than everything.Why it matters to you. It is why a mistake in one page cannot spill someone else’s record: the rule lives on the data, not on the page that asks for it.
De-identification
Removing or coarsening the details that could identify someone — a full postal code becoming three digits, an exact age becoming a decade — before data is used for anything beyond that person’s own care.Why it matters to you. It is the difference between contributing to research and being identifiable in it, and it happens before anything leaves rather than after somebody complains.
Aggregate
A count or an average describing a group. The opposite of a record: it says how many people match a description, never which people.Why it matters to you. Every figure you read on a public page here is one. None of them is a person, including when the group is small.
k-anonymity
The rule that no result may describe fewer than a set number of people — five, here. A group small enough to count is a group small enough to identify.Why it matters to you. It is the mechanism, not the promise, behind “researchers see counts, never records”. A query that would describe you on your own returns nothing at all.
Consent record
The stored state of your sharing choices. Every change appends to a separate history that the database writes and nothing can edit or delete.Why it matters to you. Your switches are the thing that moves data, and their history is not ours to rewrite — which is what makes “you can check” more than a reassurance.
Care relationship
The link between a patient and a clinician the patient has shared their record with. It is one of the two things required before a clinician sees anything, and only the patient can create it.Why it matters to you. A clinician cannot create it themselves. If you have not shared your record with them, they see nothing, whatever else is switched on.
Audit log
The record of access to health data. It accepts new entries and refuses updates and deletions, including from the platform’s own credentials.Why it matters to you. Access to your record leaves a trace that this platform cannot tidy away afterwards, which is the only version of that promise worth making.
Sentinel data
A signal from an animal used as early warning for the people around it. A dog’s routine tick-exposure test says where ticks are; it says nothing about whether a person is infected.Why it matters to you. A dog is tested routinely and a person is not, so a household’s earliest signal is often the dog’s. It is still a fact about the ground, never about anyone in the house.
Branded context
An internal pattern: a value only a consent-checking function can produce, required by anything that sends data onward. It means a new feature that forgets the check does not compile.Why it matters to you. It is why “we remembered to check” is not a promise this site has to make. A path that forgets the check does not build, so it cannot ship.
HIPAA-track
Built to the HIPAA standard, without claiming to be certified as compliant. The controls are in the code; the signed agreements and the independent assessment that compliance requires are not yet in place.Why it matters to you. It tells you exactly what is and is not claimed. Built to a standard and certified against it are different sentences, and the difference is the part usually skipped.
Element set
The published list of fields this platform stores, each defined in the open, so a lab, a clinic, a vet practice and a research team can describe the same thing the same way.Why it matters to you. It is why a filter on this site has a real field behind it. If the field is not in the set, the feature does not exist rather than existing and guessing.
Provenance
The record of where a value came from and when — which lab, which visit, whether it was uploaded, typed by hand or arrived from a claims feed.Why it matters to you. It is what lets someone who has never met you read your record and know where each line came from. A value whose source was never recorded cannot get it back.
Block group
The census unit public-health figures are described at — larger than a street, smaller than a town. It is the finest grain anything here is published at.Why it matters to you. It is why a map on this site shows an area and never a household. Anything smaller stops being a description of a place and becomes a description of the people in it.
Beacon
The reading companion inside the app. It puts what is already in your record into plain language, and only while the switch that gates it is on.Why it matters to you. It never diagnoses and it never names a treatment. It can tell you what a result says and what question that raises; what it means for you is a conversation with a clinician.
Educational information, not medical advice. These definitions describe how a term is used. They do not tell you what is true of your own case, and nothing here names a medicine, a dose or a schedule.

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