Tom Grier has consistently written articles about Lyme disease--- and they're easy to read for laymen.

I'd suggest anyone interested in just what you're fighting---- read all of his articles.

Other disease causing spirochetes, such as the genus Borrelia which causes Lyme disease and relapsing fever, have also proven difficult to culture. When they are cultured successfully, they require a very complicated culture medium and long incubation times - usually 12-48 hours or more, compared to 1-2 hours for other types of bacteria.

(Some pathogenic Borrelia strains have taken months to culture.) The cultured bacteria usually exhibit a change in their surface proteins, indicating that the organisms have adapted to the culture media differently than they would in the human host.

In other words, most disease causing spirochetes are very difficult, if not impossible, to culture! While we don't know why, we do have some clues as to what may be missing.

While you're visiting Lymenet Europe, if you want a very good group of scientific articles plus some discussion about them, that's the site to visit.