What we call Lyme disease is not just a simple infection caught from a tick-bite. It is really a complex of different interacting disorders. There are the multiple infecting organisms that can occur together or alone: Borrelia, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Bartonella, Mycoplasma and many others
There are environmental factors that can worsen and prolong the disease:
- Heavy metals
- Pesticides
- Flame retardants
- Mycotoxins
- Radiation
- Electromagnetic fields
The different responses to the infections:
- Inflammatory arthritis
- Mast cell activation syndrome
- Autoimmune disorders (which can start as early as the initial skin rash)
- Viral reactivation
- Dysautonomia
And of course the underlying factors, most obviously nutritional, that can make you vulnerable to the infections and their consequences.
No surprise then that you need a wide-ranging investigation and assessment to understand your position in this complexity. It’s rather like a SWAT analysis that businesses use (strengths, weaknesses…). We need to consider your nutritional status, your burden of environmental toxins, your immune functioning, your genomic make-up, and of course your stress level
Then we need to talk about treatments. With Lyme you must bear in mind what we said first – it is a complex of different interacting disorders. So there is no Magic Bullet that will fix it. And when one of those fails, there is no bigger, better bullet that will fix it. You have to be integrative about it.
Here are a couple of the less-expected things that we would want to factor into treatment;
Biofilm
This is how micro-organisms protect themselves from your immune system and become chronic. It can make them 100 times more resistant to antibiotics, for instance. So any treatment programme that does not take Biofilm into account may be a waste of time.
Vagus
The sympathetic nervous system (main chemical messenger adrenaline) is responsible for “fight or flight” functions in response to threats and stresses. The parasympathetic is responsible for “rest and repair” functions, and plays a big role in sleep, healing and repair. Its main channel is the Vagus nerve, the second largest nerve trunk in the body after the spinal cord. It serves all your internal organs and helps them to function and heal.
When stresses and diseases put us in a sympathetic-dominant state, we need a smooth-running Vagus nerve in order to digest, to sleep and to heal.
Vitamin D
Right now nearly everybody is deficient in vitamin D – which is only a vitamin because we don’t get enough sunlight to make our own. Without it we are likely to suffer worse symptoms from Covid and other infections; we are more prone to autoimmune diseases and cancers; we just don’t heal after injury, our gut becomes leaky, and cell-to-cell communication is disrupted.