The most common antibody lab tests for it are prone to be false negative. To truly rule out Lyme disease you should also do a Western Blot IGM, and IGA (comprehensive antibody test), PCR (which looks for the Lyme spirochete’s DNA in your blood), and LUAT (which looks for fragments of the Lyme spirochete in your urine following antibiotics). You can ask your medical doctor to order these for you.

The notion that you only get Lyme disease from a tick and if you take antibiotics right away you are safe doesn’t hold water. There are many people who got bit by a tick and immediately got on antibiotics and still developed full blown Lyme disease. There are also others who test positive for exposure to Lyme disease, who have never taken antibiotics and yet they remain healthy with no symptoms of the disease. What is going on?? Clearly, most people are healthy enough to keep this bacterium in check, whereas those who develop the chronic condition are typically in weakened state before coming in contact with the bug. At the International Lyme Disease conference in 2002, research was presented showing that almost 99% of chronic Lyme disease patients have significant, cumulative, heavy metal and chemical poisoning weakening the persons immunity, and that this is one reason the person can’t overcome the infection. Frankly, this is an area where natural medicine excels. Most medical doctors do not acknowledge this toxicity, and wouldn’t know what to do about it if they did. Basically what all this means is that one component of long term recovery is helping those with Lyme disease to eliminate the stored chemical and heavy metal toxins they are overloaded with and to avoid future exposure to these.

The Lyme organism is very hard to kill. It can randomly morph back and forth between spirochete (corkscrew form), cell wall deficient form, and cyst form. Many antibiotics kill only one form so it simply changes into a different form while you are taking those meds, and when you discontinue them it rapidly reverts back to that form again. Also, by the time one has chronic Lyme disease, multiple co-infections are there; for the same reason that the Lyme disease can’t be fought off: a weakened host that can’t fight off bugs. To effectively recover, then, one needs to address all these microbes and the Lyme bacteria in all three forms, with natural supplements that are capable of killing these bugs without adding to the person’s toxic load. It is also necessary to pulse the herbs in precise ways to encourage the Lyme in cyst form to revert to its more vulnerable adult forms.

Other things to consider are Bio-films, the need to vigorously support drainage of the Lymphatic fluid, and detoxification organs to deal with the die-off reactions of microbes, long-term immune system support, improving microcirculation, and numerous other things which can’t be covered here. The point here is that Lyme disease is complex and multi-factoral and this is why effective interventions often elude both medical doctors and alternative practitioners alike. Many of the causal chain factors that leads the person into a chronic illness were happening long before the exposure to the Lyme spirochete; it was just the final straw that broke the camels back. Of course once a chronic illness bears it’s ugly head, it is human nature to seek an easy out. I certainly did. But the reality is that there are no simple solutions to Lyme disease and those who are searching for this are truly wasting their time. To explain that last statement a little better, consider the unhealthy pattern that many persons with Lyme disease and related chronic ailments like CFS and Fibromyalgia get into. They read or hear about some new quick fix, miracle water, berry juice or whatever other new multi-level, miracle product is the latest rage, and they take the product in hopes of a cure. Then at some point in the future they realize that they are still unwell and then hear of another new miracle product and start the cycle all over again. It’s not that these products have no value, since some obviously do, it is simply that unscrupulous product companies virtually always blow the value of their products and therapies way out of proportion and promote them as stand alone cures. They do this because it works; it sells more product. It also misleads people and satisfies there desire to believe that there is a simple solution to a complex and scary problem.