Now, in 2024, as a naturopathic doctor in practice for the last 17 years, I sometimes look back on those times. While some people with a serious diagnosis/illness eventually say that it was a gift for various reasons, personally I do not. Not at all. It was horrible! A life and death struggle. I didn’t plan on dying, but there were many who did not think I was going to live. I don’t view it as a gift because of the suffering that was involved, plus I missed out on a chunk of life. Not just the acute illness days, but the rebuilding of my life as well. Still, I don’t look back at it bitterly. I no longer feel traumatized by it. I simply look back at it objectively and pragmatically as in: What happened, how did I finally find my way to recovery, and how I can help my patients today? Which, of course, is now my job. To think about illness in an objective, holistic approached, non-emotional, and pragmatic way. But that’s very difficult to do when you’re in the thick of it. It’s difficult to not be emotional when your life has been taken away, you are facing death at a young age, or you’re suffering horribly.

Regarding obstacles that I had to face in making a full recovery from Lyme disease was making life and death decisions about treatments and clinics. One of the things that didn’t exist so much back then as it does exist today is information overload. Lyme disease patients today are bombarded with information about products, supplements, clinics, clinic treatment equipment, and home therapy equipment. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Unquestionable advancements have been made in virtually every area of natural medicine. I think if you use those things intelligently, judiciously, and in a way that fits what your body actually needs they can be really amazing. They can contribute to a better and faster recovery. But for some people, this leaves them in a state of being overwhelmed as to what to do and they end up with analysis paralysis.

A second thing for recovery that’s an obstacle is financial constraints (of course) because their insurance doesn’t pay and even if they do, drug-based therapies covered by insurance only rarely result in sustained recovery, if any recovery at all. In my case, when I got sick from an illness that seemed to come on rather rapidly, I had to sell my business, my house, and my mother sold my grandparent’s home. I also had to sell a lot of timberland property that I had inherited from my father; land that I grieved over losing. Would I have died if I had not had that money to spend battling Lyme disease from liquidated property? Quite likely I would have died. And not so much that every illness requires a huge quantity of money to beat it, but really, it was the simple fact that I made so many mistakes and so many wrong turns on the path to recovery. I spent money on so many things that didn’t really help. That that was the more relevant reason why I went through my property and assets. I was getting an education in everything that didn’t work. In reality the things that often helped the most, cost much less in the big picture.

A third obstacle to recovery that may be the most relevant of all: Many of us get in our own way and we become the biggest block to our own recovery. I certainly went through those foibles as well. I had a period of anger (of course) over getting sick when no one else I knew was dealing with anything like that. That anger tended to manifest in doing aggressive, harsh, or even what one might consider self-abusive treatments. For instance, doing harmful, aggressive drug therapies that did more damage than good or going to extremes in general. I was also impatient and that would cause me to make impetuous or rapid decisions without giving thought to those treatment choices. Not really taking the time to think and putting the whole illness picture together.  

There was also a desire to simplify. You commonly see this. People want a simple answer. Unfortunately, with chronic Lyme disease and other similar type health issues, there simply is not a simple answer to that complex problem. Regardless of that fact, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of salesmen and entities selling products and equipment and therapies and protocols and books that will tell you that they have the one solution. That if you simply do what they tell you to do or buy their multi-level product or take their supplement that you can stop everything else. You have found your solution! This is ubiquitous within the natural health industry and is driven by commerce not evidence-based approaches to wellness. Unfortunately, with a million voices screaming “I have the answer”, that leads to a condition psychologists refer to as premature closure. This is when you believe you have closure to a serious, threatening, scary, or life-altering problem; something that you desperately need a solution to. Then someone comes along and gives you closure. You give them your money and they give you closure. Yet unfortunately it’s premature closure because you find that 6 to 12 months later you are still sick and not well or, as in my case, getting worse. Refunds are not typical in this circumstance. They are busy selling to the next eager customer. Yes, it may sound a bit jaded, but I went through it firsthand. Greed is not exclusive to big pharma. It also exists in natural medicine. Pharma is just better at it. But whatever the case, you as the sick person trying to fight for your life can fall victim to it.

Other ways we get in our own way is that at some point patients essentially feel helpless. They’re fearful to try anything to get themselves better at some point; being afraid of both treatments and treatment symptoms. Learned helplessness happens when someone has tried so many things and failed so many times that they simply believe there is no solution so they give in to feeling totally helpless (I was there once so no judgement here). Sometimes people who have engaged with natural medicine and have failed repeatedly have taken that stance. It’s just human nature to give up when you’ve been punished enough with a particular problem and nothing seems to work. Unfortunately, people who truly believe that there is no hope and no recovery, or more than willing to share that with those who are still fighting. And so, I don’t agree with that; especially looking back at things objectively from a recovery standpoint. It’s not fair to tell a person who is fighting to overcome something that they will fail just because you did. It’s taking away hope. Not false hope, but real hope. People fighting a devastating illness are in a fragile state of mind. Taking away someone’s hope could lead to them committing suicide. It’s that serious! What’s more conventional medicine promotes this idea as well. That if drugs and surgery can’t fix it, live with it (or die with it) And that permeates views of health and recovery and helplessness as well.

 A key factor in my recovery, as with most everyone else who beat the odds and beat stage 3 Lyme disease, is good doctors and good mentors. I needed people that guided me along the pathway to recovery. Some of these include Doctor Rita Ferraro N.D. She’s a naturopathic doctor and a peptide specialist who recovered from severe MCS. At the time I met her, she was not a doctor. We were both fighting for our lives in Dallas, Texas. The only difference between us as patients fighting similar health issues is that she was a very caring person who opened up and communicated to me. She also had a much better base knowledge of natural health than I did at that time. Her advice was stop the toxic drug regimens and flood my body with nutrients and open detox pathway (elegantly simple) and it proved lifesaving! Her book “Save your life” outlines those basics.

Mentor 2: Doctor William Rea M.D. in Dallas, Texas, may he rest in peace did save my life in 1997 by putting me through a 2-month supervised sauna detox protocol, and also TPN nutrition, which was intravenously fed to me via multiple catheters (they kept getting infected with staph) for a year. Dr. Eea, to be sure saved the life of many extremely ill, chemically poisoned patients and has published more on this subject of chemical poisoning and chemical sensitivity than any other doctor in the world. Years later in 2011 I had the privilege to speak at the same conference with him at the 2011 Integrative Lyme Solutions conference in Dallas, Tx. I went to his table at lunch and asked if he remembered me and he said no. Then a few minutes his face kind of lit up and he said, “Yes I do remember you! You were one of my Hyper Al patients!” (meaning intravenously fed). I guess I looked quite different as a healthy man than the concentration camp former self.

Mentor 3: Most of all, I cannot say enough words of praise to Doctor William Lee Cowden M.D., who I met in late 2002 when I became a part of his 28-patient pilot study comparing holistic, all natural medicine Lyme treatment to drug therapy for stage three Lyme. Doctor Cowden’s 14 patients made dramatic improvement in ten weeks! That study is poorly understood because some people think it as just 2 or 3 products from NutraMedix. Whereas actually, it was an incredibly comprehensive protocol. We were using supplements from multiple companies (up to 25 per patient) and no patient was on the same protocol. These were energetically tested by Dr Cowden weekly, and we were doing a wide variety of clinic treatments as well. Doctor Cowden has been my friend and mentor ever since then, over 20 years now. I was better but still dealing with ongoing, recurrent Lyme and co-infections in early 2003 and doctor Cowden’s treatment unquestionably completed my recovery.

Another doctor who finally must be mentioned gave me lifesaving advice as a mentor. He was an acupuncturist/traditional Chinese medicine specialist, and naturopathic doctor in Dallas, Texas who shall go unnamed (because I’m sure that’s what he would want.) He essentially gave me the concept of causal chain before I ever met doctor Cowden. How an illness, which seemed to come out of nowhere begins with one step, after another step, after another step, like dominoes falling. Things that are going on in the body that may be insidious or imperceptible to the person who’s moving towards a serious illness or diagnosis. Without us understanding of causal chain, and basic progression of illness, how can we ever expect to reverse it in a logical way? In my next post I am going to teach you that basic framework of progression into chronic Lyme disease taught to me those years ago, and surprisingly the tick bite was the final straw, not the sole root cause of why you or I progressed into chronic Lyme disease, when others seem immune