The words, before the appointment

10 clinical terms · 10 platform terms · free, no account

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 the ones about testing, 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.

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.

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.

Seroconversion

The moment your antibody levels become high enough to detect. Before it, a test can be negative while an infection is present.

Coinfection

A second organism transmitted by the same tick in the same bite. Different organism, different illness, often different treatment.

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.

EM rash

Erythema migrans — the expanding rash sometimes called a bull’s-eye. Present in some cases and absent in many.

Vector

The organism that carries an infection between hosts. For Lyme, the tick.

Nymph

A juvenile tick stage. Small enough to be missed easily, which is part of why bites often go unnoticed.

Prophylaxis

Treatment given to prevent an infection rather than to treat a confirmed one. Whether it applies is a clinical judgement.

These appear on the pages describing how LymeHQ handles data. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Care relationship

The link between a patient and a clinician they have added. It is one of the two things required before a clinician sees anything, and only the patient can create it.

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.

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.

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.

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.