In this podcast, we talk with Dr. Sarah Keating. As an anatomic pathologist for more than 35 years, Sarah worked on staff at a number of hospitals in Ontario as well as at Ontario Forensic Pathology Services. She is recently retired but is passionate about learning as much as possible about tick borne diseases in order to help improve the access to care for suffering patients. She maintains her affiliation with the University of Toronto as an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology. Sarah has been a member of the CanLyme board since 2022 and she is also an active member of ILADS – the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society.
Sarah is committed to spreading awareness of the potential causative role of tick-borne diseases in mental illness, promoting education of Canadian health care practitioners and policy makers in tick-borne diseases, and promoting the role of tissue diagnosis to increase our understanding of these diseases.
Topics discussed
1:25 How Dr. Keating became interested in becoming a pathologist
2:20 What being a pathologist entails
3:06 What led Dr. Keating to be interested in Lyme disease
4:13 How pathology and Lyme disease intersect, and what a biobank is
5:38 Access to new information to Lyme for medical professionals
6:10 The importance of curiosity in medicine and the troubles of misinformation
7:09 ILADS conference in 2024, and Dr. Keating’s role at the conference for CanLyme
8:55 Support for healthcare practitioners who treat Lyme through CanLyme
10:12 The most helpful takeaways from ILADS conference 2024 and the trouble with Canadian Lyme disease testing
11:12 Differences in international standards for diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease
12:37 The role of climate change in the spread of Lyme disease
13:45 The activities that CanLyme is currently running
14:14 The potential of tick borne diseases in mental illnesses
16:35 What keeps Dr. Keating motivated
17:45 Dr. Keating’s suggestions for those who have been recently diagnosed with Lyme disease
Get a tick removal kit
CanLyme’s Tick Removal Kit has everything you need to properly remove and store a tick for further identification and testing, and is easy to pack and find in your backpack, purse, glove box, first aid kit and in your home.
In this episode Sarah talks about the effects of Lyme disease on the brain with Dr. Shea, a senior staff psychologist, professor and President of Neuropsychological Evaluation and Treatment Services in New York City and Boston. Dr. Shea starts off by explaining many of the effects that Lyme disease has on the brain including the ability to process information, changes in memory, multitasking and high level reasoning.
Sarah explores Lyme disease from a nursing perspective with Nurse Practitioner Dr. Ginger Savely. Dr. Savely has specialized in the treatment of patients with tick-borne illnesses for the past two decades, and has authored and co-authored many articles in nursing and medical journals.
Dr. Biswas describes the role of neural therapy in treating neurological pain caused by an entrapped peripheral nerve as releasing the nerve so it can polarize properly.
