For years, patients with Lyme disease and other complex tick-borne illness histories have argued that some of the most important parts of their medical journeys never make it into a laboratory report. The months spent searching for an explanation can disappear into a sequence of office visits. A symptom pattern that becomes recognizable only in retrospect may be scattered across notes written by several specialists. A treatment that coincided with an unexpected change may be preserved simply as a medication start and stop date, without any meaningful account of what the patient experienced in between.
