Alternative Treatments for Lyme

Lyme disease activists are protesting the latest Lyme treatment guidelines declared by the IDSA, and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has begun an investigation into the guidelines. Since the CDC posted the new guidelines in October, patients have reported to the Lyme Disease Association that their insurance companies have denied them further treatment. Many people suffering post-Lyme symptoms or chronic Lyme have sought treatment for the debilitating effects of the disease through long-term use of antibiotics, and now an anxious population is being denied medicine.

Regardless of the outcome of this legal struggle, new cases of Lyme disease, which has typically been underdiagnosed and under-reported, are multiplying with alarming speed. Harvard medical school researchers say that in spite of the CDC's estimate that 20,000 cases are declared each year, the number is closer to 200,000.

Lyme disease affects every cell in the body, invading the heart, brain, central nervous system, the organs, skin, tissue and bone. It freely moves throughout the body, feeding in its “favorite restaurants,” according to master herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner: the heart, the skin, the knees. The spirochetes that cause Lyme are scavengers that feast off of collagen tissue, which exists almost everywhere in the body. Lyme can cause crippling fatigue, overwhelming pain and disabling mental dsyfunction.

As Buhner says in his book, Healing Lyme: Natural Healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis and Its Coinfections, at this point given our knowledge about the disease, antibiotics are probably the best choice for killing spirochetes. Yet the complexities of the disease often call for a complex approach to treatment, not a one-size-fits-all campaign. Herbs, vitamin therapy and other natural healing protocol are popular subjects among the Lyme population, who know first-hand that antibiotics can, and often do fail in treating Lyme disease and its coinfections.

All Rights Reserved/ LDRD/ Suzanne Arthur