Lyme Disease
Lyme Disease
Lyme Disease
Beyond Basic Descriptions of Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is, at least officially, a disease caused by the transmission of the spirochete (corkscrew) bacterium Borrelia Burgdorferi that goes from a tick to a human via their bite/attachment to us. Deer and other mammals play a role in keeping the life cycle of the ticks and can be reservoirs for the Lyme bug, which ticks then spread to other animals.
But the purpose of this website information, and this page on Lyme disease is not to give a basic description of Lyme disease. Since you are on the website of Jack Miller N.D. you are probably someone that has already done your research on the basics of this disease, and don’t need them repeated. Instead, this article will cover the following subjects: My personal story of recovery which led to becoming a Lyme literate Naturopathic doctor, the extreme limitations of a drug only approach. This is very important because even formerly conservative agencies like the C.D.C. are telling the public just how rapidly tick-borne diseases are spreading in this country- and the risks that these pose.
Having recovered from Lyme disease and co-infections and worked with Lyme patients for many years, I can tell you for a certainty that holistic treatments for Lyme disease are rapidly growing and improving in America. They are keeping up with, if not surpassing the spread of the disease itself. Which is great, by the way! America is a country of innovators, and the desire to heal and be well is a powerful force. Some very smart clinicians and researchers have been studying Lyme and how to beat this disease for several decades now. This page includes my story, along with a quick overview of how natural medicine has outpaced conventional drug based approaches to chronic Lyme disease. Note that we are talking about chronic Lyme here. Antibiotics should always be used for acute, initial exposure Lyme.
Lyme Disease
A STORY OF LYME DISEASE RECOVERY
I contracted Lyme disease approximately in 1990. It is not certain where. I had served at Ft. Hood Texas then, and my Battalion bivouacked in the wild there with plenty of ticks and later at Camp Robinson in Arkansas. Other veterans who served in these areas also got Lyme disease, at least according to my LLMD (Lyme literate medical doctor) whom I treated with in Texas. He treated other Ft. Hood veterans that had contracted Lyme disease there.
What began as a low-grade fever, aches and pains, and mental and physical exhaustion in the early 90’s, that I repeatedly sought out medical help for, continued on undiagnosed for years. After countless work ups and doctors, including 2 trips to Mayo clinic in Minnesota, I finally got a confirmed diagnosis with a Western Blot antibody test in 1997, later confirmed by serum PCR. At that point I was near death (from a disease that a few short years earlier had been described as “all in my head”.) I will not get into all the details, but I was very, very ill. I had lost 57 lbs. of normal body, from 155 down to 98 lbs. I had to be fed intravenously for 1 year, at which time there were multiple life-threatening catheter infections due to a very weakened immune system. I also had mercury and chemical poisoning. There was severe insomnia, depression, anxiety, muscle pain, joint pain, and neuropathy. My family and some doctors did not expect me to live, much less get well. The reason for this brief description of my descension into what was essentially Lyme disease hell, is to stress something very important to you, or anyone that you know who is battling Lyme disease. That there is hope! Basically, what I am saying is that if I can get well, anyone can. You can, and/or your loved ones can! How though?
Biological Terrain
The great debate over the strength of the bug or the strength of the host.
If you have done much digging into the subject of holistic Lyme disease solutions, you have probably heard of the controversy between Louis Pasteur (from which the name “pasteurization” comes) and Antoine Bechamp – two 19th Century French scientists.
The debate goes something like this…
Pasteur theorized that microscopic organisms clearly visible under the newly invented microscopes of the day were the “cause” of virtually all diseases. The proof was that every time he looked at diseased tissues under a microscope, sure enough…there were the bacteria. It was theorized that the more virulent and nasty the bug one had come in contact with, the worse their disease was.
Bechamp on the other hand taught that the cellular terrain was everything. That is – the strength of the host was the primary determining factor in disease. As this definition of terrain evolved, it came to mean that at the microscopic level, the health of individual cells, robust activity of immune cells, and a vigorous flow of nutrients into cells and waste products out of cells determined disease more than the nastiness of the bugs.
Basically, Pasteur’s camp won the debate and it shaped modern medicine. The practice of “find a bug – use a drug” was born. The notion of improving host resistance, a prospect that is quite a bit more difficult than taking a pill (and not very profitable) faded away. But the controversy still rages on, and has degraded into name-calling. Some would paint Pasteur as an evil villain who committed various evil and treacherous acts throughout his life (not the author’s view.)
“Okay”, you might ask “Why should I care?”
Good question!
You may not have much interest in medical history, but it does very much affect people’s lives to this very day, both yours and mine. When you get a cold or flu and walk out of a doctor’s office with a prescription for an expensive antibiotic (that actually has no affect on your viral infection), you are living the outcome of this debate. If you are struggling to overcome chronic Lyme disease or almost any other chronic illness the debate becomes quite a bit more personal. In fact your future health could depend on an accurate comprehension of these important principles. So which one was right? Is disease determined by the nastiness of the bug or the strength and resistance of the host?
You probably guessed that being a traditional naturopath, I favor Bechamp’s philosophy, but it’s not that cut and dry. It really can’t be 100% one way or the other. Terrain is so very important but also some bugs like Borrelia Burgdorferi can obviously be quite nasty. In order to deepen your understanding of this important health concept and controversy I want to give two illustrations. The first is an embellished version of an illustration on the importance of healthy terrain that I have heard holistic Lyme disease expert William Lee Cowden M.D. give at several A.C.I.M. medical conferences. It goes something like this:
What would happen if all the garbage collectors in New York City went on strike? …Imagine the scenario in your mind for a bit. To begin with, folks would start bringing their sacks of garbage out to the curb and the piles would grow larger day by day. Then it would begin piling up in allies, vacant lots, and finally the streets themselves. Basically everywhere.
Eventually, there would be no place to put it outside and peoples’ homes and apartments would overflow with stinking garbage and yep, you guessed it, now come the vermin! Rats, mice, roaches and flies would have a heyday. They are everywhere and people are complaining, so the city leaders have an emergency meeting to address the problem. After an all night brainstorming session they announce the solution to the press: they will hire a crack team of professional rat and mouse snipers and bug exterminators! Over the next few weeks the rat-killers scour the city shooting rats and mice, and the exterminators fumigate the whole city with pesticides. What is the outcome? ….piles of garbage with dead bugs and pesticide residue on them, and dead rats and mice everywhere. But after a short time the vermin are all back and another emergency meeting is needed. Solution: more powerful pesticides and hire additional rat and mouse snipers.
Do you see the correlation here to human health? New York City represents your body – the garbage collectors represent all the pathways by which you literally eliminate garbage from your body, such as the bowel, liver, kidneys, and lymphatic system. When these fail at doing their job properly or fast enough, bad things begin to happen, including the methodical appearance of one chronic infection after the other. Waste products and toxins like heavy metals, chemicals, metabolic waste products, and microbial biotoxins begin to back up in your city as it were. This is why holistic practitioners such as myself routinely recommend liver detoxification therapies and flushes, kidney cleanses, lymphatic drainage, and homeopathic Terrain remedies to clear the fluid between the cells of debris, and so forth. The notion is that yes, people with chronic illnesses do have chronic infections, lots of them. And yes, they are making people sick, but what really is the solution, especially when these are chronic and entrenched, such as the case for example with chronic Lyme disease? The ludicrous illustration above highlights the futility of hammering infections with one antibiotic after the other and/or natural bug killers, while neglecting unhealthy terrain, and a broken detoxification system.
The limitations of a drug-based approach
For late-stage Lyme disease, and really for just about any case of chronic Lyme disease, antibiotic therapy does not lead to full recovery, and this has been validated by various studies. Working with Lyme patients holistically for many years, I can tell you that from a clinical standpoint it is not that unusual to see very sick Lyme patients who report significant worsening of their condition after and during oral and IV antibiotic treatments at Lyme clinics. Not in every case of course, but seemingly more often with more severe and complex Lyme cases. Why is that? After all, the simple definition of Lyme is that it is a bacterial infection, causing pathology. The find a bug, use a drug approach should work if Lyme disease were that simple. But it is not….and that is the problem. By the time patients develop advanced chronic Lyme disease there are many other factors. For example, the majority of Lyme bacteria may have changed into cyst form, which are extremely difficult to kill, or L-form which have shed their cell wall and taken a round form that can be a stealth pathogen and evade immune detection until the bacteria is ready to resume the more invasive spiral form. In addition to the evasive nature of the Lyme pathogen itself, you could also have multiple, additional tick-borne infections besides the Lyme, some of which may have been transmitted by the same tick that gave someone Lyme disease originally. One tick, multiple infections. This explains why some have such an acute and serious bout of Lyme disease right after exposure and/or progress right into chronic Lyme despite standard antibiotic therapy. Their immune system is fighting more than one new infection simultaneously.
How does antibiotic failure relate to all this? The reasons are complicated, but the briefest answer is that no antibiotic kills all 3 life cycle forms of the Borrelia Burgdorferi bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and the bacteria can quickly convert between forms, as needed for its own survival. Studies show that the Lyme bacteria immediately begins encysting within minutes after antibiotics enter the blood stream. Secondly, as mentioned there are many, many potential co-infections, including some that are concomitant with Lyme disease, but not from ticks. So as one progresses toward chronic Lyme, they can be picking up new co-infections from multiple sources. In the case of some of these co-infections, they aren’t also affected by antibiotics at all! Thus, an additional reason for antibiotic failure comes into play. Competent LLMDs know these things of course, and are certainly sharing their knowledge in various ways, and testing for and attempting to treat the many other potential co-infections. That is good news. In some cases, though, it is still not enough. This is where we get into the aforementioned very sick Lyme patients, like myself formerly, that just respond very poorly to the find infections and kill them approach. And just to be clear here, we are not talking about the Herxheimer reaction, a symptom that is supposed appear and then go away as toxin producing microbes die, we are talking about a progressive overall worsening of health while taking multiple antibiotics. Getting worse when they are supposed to get better. So again, for some patients, why is that?
The reasons are not always simple, but all chronic Lyme patients do have strong similarities in the deeper rooted, underlying cause of their chronic Lyme disease that are not benefitted by pharmaceutical intervention! And really, these cannot be addressed by anything other than holistic methods. Both the Herheimer reaction (dying infections releasing toxins into the body) along with the moderate toxicity of the drugs themselves, often just worsen an already negative situation in the body. Common denominators include, chronic emotional stress, detoxification organ congestion, nutritional deficiencies, cumulative toxin accumulations of heavy metals, pesticides, glyphosate, mold toxins (see Laser energetic detoxification for how we address these), and various other internal toxicities, for instance from unaddressed gut infections (think fungus and parasites). There can be structural issues, lymphatic stagnation, low anabolic function and tissue regeneration due to low stem cell activity or deficiencies in anabolic hormones, along with cortisol excess, and really the list could go on and on. But these are things that need to be properly tested and treated (without doing harm).
We can achieve faster recovery from Lyme Disease
I like to think of the 80’s and 90’s as the dark ages for Lyme diagnostics. To be sure, Lyme disease is a fairly recent epidemic (as diseases go), and sadly false negative lab tests are still commonplace. Think about what that means: If someone is going through a tremendous amount of stress trying to get the best diagnostic assistance possible to actually know why they are sick and getting sicker, false negative diagnoses are far worse than no diagnosis at all. Because with a false negative lab test and a doctor who you trust telling you that you do not have this disease, mentally one checks that off as “not what I have”, and that’s it. Quite likely anytime a doctor in the future who is still actually trying to diagnose your illness suggests testing for Lyme disease, you will blurt out “No I don’t have that. I have already been tested.” The Elisa antibody test has probably caused more harm than good as a diagnostic method, in my view. Not to say it is always wrong. For instance, when it is positive, it is usually right, but false negatives are the norm. Thankfully, things have gotten a lot better.
Currently, for blood work, 3 of the best labs are Vibrant labs, DNA ConneXions, and IGeneX. They have various antibody tests, PCR, etc. In addition to Lyme they test for a wide variety of co-infections including multiple Borrelia species, multiple Babesia species and many other viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections. We use Tick-borne 2.0 which is one of the most thorough tick-borne/Lyme tests in existence. It is a blood test for 52 type of infections that are the most commonly associated with acute and chronic Lyme disease, and tests each infection 3 different ways, IgM (antibodies for an acute or recent infection), IgG (antibodies for an older or chronic infection), and PCR (the DNA or RNA of the microbe in your blood, indicating active presence and not just immune response (we only offer this test to members of dpnwa.org-please feel free to inquire for more information).
These tests are very good. Are they flawless? There is no such thing in any Lyme diagnostic method. But the more information you get to confirm a diagnosis the better. Additional holistic and alternative evaluation methods can include electrodermal screening such as Dr. Lee Cowden M.D.’s custom EDS scans that go far outside the box as far as Lyme pathogen testing. There is darkfield microscopy or live blood examination that sometimes allows you to literally see Lyme spirochete bacteria moving in blood from a finger prick (Lyme bacteria can penetrate and live inside red blood cells.), and there is also kinesiological evaluation. While these latter things are not considered diagnostic by the allopathic medical system, they can be valuable, and certainly played an important role in my own comprehension and recovery of from Lyme disease.
On a final note about understanding what pathogens are a driving force in chronic Lyme, I (Jack Miller) also stay abreast of newly emerging Lyme associated infections that are recognized in research, but have no current mainstream way that the average person can be tested for them. Due to my 2 decades long friendship and mentorship with Dr. William Lee Cowden M.D., I do have deep connections in the Lyme disease clinician and research community. Regarding all the above-mentioned methods, we do them all at our las Vegas location, and members of dpnwa.org can schedule appointments anytime they wish (although we are in the process of upgrading microscopes so it may not be available in the immediate future.)
Far superior holistic treatment methods today than in the past
The knowledge of how to speed recovery from Lyme disease has grown tremendously in recent years. Although it was 20 years ago, those fundamental things that Dr. Cowden provided to 14 patients in a 28 patient pilot study haven’t changed*. They were powerful then, and they are still powerful! Some Lyme patients know doctor Cowden from the Nutramedix Cowden support program for Lyme, an herbal protocol that evolved from that original study. This Nutramedix protocol is excellent and has helped many as a first step in recovery (you can call for more information about it), but as a patient in that study in 2003, I can tell you that it was much more customized to each individual patient and much more intense than is possible for one supplement company to reproduce. It also involved clinic therapy equipment and continuous energetic evaluation by doctor Cowden during those 10 weeks. As Dr. Cowden would quickly tell you, recovery is faster when you address more things faster, in the proper steps. As a Lyme literate naturopathic doctor who has been helping Lyme patients create their own success stories since 2010 (and a little bit before that to be honest), I have to work hard to stay abreast of all the newest methods and interventions that can make a Lyme patient’s recovery faster. But it is my purpose in life (at least professionally) to help Lyme patients overcome a horrible disease and get their life back. This page cannot get too deeply into every possible natural therapy being done at every clinic that is doing good work with Lyme disease. Its purpose is to discuss what we do at our Las Vegas office. Here are seven things that seem essential to recovery from chronic Lyme disease and a variety of other chronic health problems.
Laser Energetic Detoxification-
This amazing modality formulated by Dr. Cowden can drastically open the detox pathways and restore detoxification without the typical inflammation associated with detox. It is a bioenergetic method. It combines homeopathy with photonic devices to stimulate detoxification of the specific chemicals and heavy metals. It requires a very specific electrodermal screening scan that identifies your toxicity issues. These are done as 2 laser energetic detox sessions on separate days after your appointment.
Ozone sauna and other key pieces of home health therapies
Ozone is antimicrobial, reduces pain, increases immune function, lowers viral titres for a wide variety of viral illnesses, regenerates burned or damaged tissues, and when combined with sauna is a powerful detoxification method. Our primary goal is to introduce you to in-clinic therapies like ozone sauna that you can later set up in the most practical and least expensive way, so that you can avoid costly repetitive clinic charges. Home equipment is the way to go and much less expensive in the long run. Most Lyme patients and other chronic illness patients need continuity of treatment. Today you can get these set up for home use better than ever and ozone sauna is easy to set up at home. But if you have never experienced it, you need to do it a clinic first, to understand how it works, and so we provide that. Repeated ozone saunas done twice a week was crucial for my long term, and full recovery. Ozone sauna is normally the first piece of therapy equipment that you need to get better health faster. There is a dizzying array of natural health equipment out there, though. Part of our mission is to not only assess your health as an individual, but to guide you through all the misinformation out there as to what home health equipment and methods is going to give you the best results. You really do need to be a wise consumer to get those therapy devices that will help you the most. Because we have patients that have come all over, they need beneficial treatments at home as well as what we can do in our clinic.
Lymphatic drainage– There are many diverse lymphatic drainage methods out there. Mostly they are unneeded. All you really need is a skin brush and the right technique to brush the body in the direction of lymphatic flow. Of course, sometimes you need more, and so we provide a natural lymphatic drainage therapy combination that works synergistically. Here is a tip for good lymphatic drainage methods; when they work well, provided you have good detoxification and organ support (see Spagyric Homeopathics next), you will almost always feel better!
Spagyric homeopathics– We use German made Pekana remedies. These can support the body’s organs, immune system, hormonal system, nervous system, and detoxification and drainage very powerfully.
Comprehensive functional medicine testing and supplements– Along with individualized nutrient dense diet recommendations, and other methods to flood the body with nutrients, this can be essential. This functional medicine oriented approach must also include comprehensive gut biome testing via stool tests, urine organic acid and all overall holistic digestive support that is needed to improve digestion and assimilation of nutrients.
Heavy metal detoxification– Finally, you need thorough testing of heavy metals, heavy metal sensitivity, soft tissue levels, hair analysis and along with the recommended Laser energetic detox, you need appropriate heavy metal oral chelation that specifically addresses your body heavy metal burden. We use a variety of methods for this. And last but not least, you need…..
Kill therapies– For Lyme disease specifically (we do work with many other health conditions) we use the most potent natural Lyme remedies in existence. These are in the category of “kill therapies”, when it is needed to use the big guns to attack an infection with natural antimicrobials. We use evidence-based products, and well researched products. We also energetically test the compatibility of all these products so that you get individualized recommendations. The specific combination that is recommended to you will include those things that specifically address the infections that your body is fighting, based on the aforementioned testing. You need products that are well researched to address the infections contributing to chronic Lyme disease. Very few Lyme patients have the exact profile of chronic infection in their body. You need things precisely for you, not someone else, and those infections need to be treated in a logical order.
Parasites are the last to be addressed typically, with the purpose of eradication so that they never come back. The Cowden custom Lyme scan, parasite scan, and bacterial fungal scans test 244 different herbal and other Kill therapies on each patient, and rates these energetically for how compatible these are for you as an individual.
Better Health Faster- You can recover from Lyme disease by combining the best of holistic treatments
Clearly, when you come for an appointment, we wouldn’t do all the tests and recommend all the possible therapies mentioned here, nor would it be advisable to do so. And unless a person is very ill, they will not likely need everything discussed here. As a naturopathic practitioner whether addressing Lyme disease or something else, I want to get to the basics of what you need now at each appointment. We give you protocol recommendations that are simple enough to follow, with the goal to improve your health over 4 to 6 weeks. We see you for an appointment every 4 to 6 weeks (sometimes 8 weeks for out of state), and at each appointment the body tells what its priorities are to heal. Its your journey to recovery to make. I am just the guide. Call us today for more details or to schedule your appointment.