With each new tick, the physical therapists at BKB Performance’s clinic in California’s San Bernardino Mountains have to take a more holistic view of their patients’ problems and then offer more tailored treatment.
“Tick control” refers to the amount of time that a patient has to wait for a tick to appear, and that’s when they decide what treatment to offer, such as tick-infused gel, massage or even a “tick-bait” of the skin for a few minutes.
“It’s all about getting the patients to feel like they’re doing the right thing,” says Mark Jager, a physical therapist who has worked at BKC for 20 years.
“If we don’t, the patients are likely to continue having problems with their symptoms.
We want to help them to feel better and to know they’re being cared for.”
“The patients will have to learn to live with the fact that they’re not going to get rid of the ticks, they’re just going to have to deal with the discomfort.”
The most common problem patients have with ticks is aching muscles, according to Jager.
“Some of them have a hard time holding their breath and have a lot of difficulty holding their head down.
And some of them are so tired they just want to go home.”
With that in mind, Jager and his team have developed a program to treat those patients.
The program, called Tick Control, involves treating patients with gel, a gel spray that helps the skin relax and soothe the body.
The gel is also a great way to prevent infections, as the bacteria in the gel prevent them from spreading to other parts of the body, Jagers says.
“You get rid the tick, and then you take care of the rest.”
BKB, an American-based health care company, is a pioneer in tick control, having invented Tick Control as an anti-tick deterrent in 2009.
“Our mission is to improve the lives of the people we care for,” says Brian Naylor, vice president of operations and development at BKP, the company’s clinical unit.
“To be able to offer that type of treatment to the people that we serve is really what our mission is.”
A tick-free environment for tick prevention In the United States, there are about 5.7 million tick-borne illnesses and about 1.4 million deaths annually, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s estimated that there are as many as a million tick bites every year.
There are about 7.6 million tick treatments available.
“There’s a lot more research and research that needs to be done,” says Dr. Jennifer Wiegand, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has researched tick control for decades.
“The question we really need to ask ourselves is, how much does this tick-control thing actually work?
And the answer is: It doesn’t.”
The answer is that there is no evidence that tick control works.
“This research has shown us that the answer to this question is ‘not very much,'” says Dr Michael DeMoss, director of the National Tick-Borne Diseases Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health.
“And it’s not the best answer because it’s just not true.”
In fact, the Cochrane Review, which reviews the research literature, concluded that there’s no evidence to support the effectiveness of tick control.
“That is one of the reasons I’ve been a skeptic,” says Jager of the Cochran-Moss review.
“Because they have so little evidence to back it up.”
What ticks do The tick-battles in the United Kingdom and Canada are most common, and they cause around 4,000 deaths annually.
In the US, there’s only one case of tick-induced encephalitis in the country, and there have been fewer than 500 reported cases of tick bites and tick-related complications in that country.
However, there is an increase in tick bites in some countries and an increase of tick bite-related deaths, says Jagers.
“In many countries where the incidence is low, the incidence of tickbite-related mortality is higher than it is in the US,” he says.
In fact the US Centers for Diseases Control and Preventative Medicine estimates that the annual incidence of ticks is now about 1 million, with an average of about 200,000 tick bites per year.
However the number of tick species in the U.S. is estimated to be around 6,000, according with the American Academy of Dermatology.
Jagers and DeMors suggest that tick bites may be increasing in some parts of our country.
“We’re not seeing the same kind of increase in cases of Lyme disease,” DeMons says.
But even if we did see a dramatic increase in the number and severity of tick tick-bite-causing illnesses, the answer could
