Kenneth B. Liegner, MD

Private Practice Pawling, New York

Disulfiram in the Treatment of Lyme disease: Promise & Perils

Dr. Kenneth Liegner is a Board Certified Internist with additional training in Pathology and Critical Care Medicine, practicing in Pawling, New York. He has been actively involved in diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease and related disorders since 1988. He has published articles on Lyme disease in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has presented poster abstracts and talks at national and international conferences on Lyme disease and other tick borne diseases. He has cared for many persons seriously ill with chronic and neurologic Lyme disease. His work has focused on the serious morbidity and (occasional) mortality that can eventuate from this aspect of the illness. He has emphasized the urgent need for widespread clinical availability of improved methods of diagnostic testing and for development of improved methods of treatment for Lyme disease in all its stages. He holds the first United States patent issued proposing application of acaricide to deer for area-wide control of deer-tick populations as a means of reducing the incidence of Lyme disease. He has authored In the Crucible of Chronic Lyme Disease – Collected Writings & Associated Materials, a documentational history of the struggle to characterize the nature of Lyme disease in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, published November 2015 (www.inthecrucibleofchroniclymedisease.com).

He served two terms on the Board of Directors of The International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (www.ilads.org), is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lyme Disease Association (www.lymediseaseassociation.org), and is a member of the American Medical Association (www.ama-assn.org), the Westchester County Medical Society (www,wcms.org), the Medical Society of the State of New York (www.mssny.org) and The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (www.aapsonline.org). He is on the staff of Northern Westchester Hospital Center in Mount Kisco, New York (Northwell Health System) and the Sharon Hospital in Sharon, Connecticut (Nuvance Health System).

He was the first physician to apply disulfiram in the treatment of Lyme disease and published his experience with his first three patients in the peer-reviewed journal Antibiotics, May 2019 (https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/8/2/72) and reported his first 3 years’ experience with the drug in December 2020 (Antibiotics 2020, 9(12), 868; https://doi.org/10.3390/antibiotics9120868) He was co-author on a landmark pathologic study of tissues from a person with chronic Lyme disease (https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/8/4/183) and co-author of the ILADS evidence-based definition of chronic Lyme disease (https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/8/4/269). .  

Conference Lecture Summary Some 4 years have elapsed since disulfiram was first knowingly applied in the treatment of persons with Lyme disease. Experience with the agent thus far, in one medical practice, is reviewed.