MichaelTampa

I have done this. Copy of any test results you have is good, I think he had me fax them all to him before-hand. Get ready for some fast-paced carefully-targeted and specific questions! As always, a list of questions you have is good, as danddd has said.

I posted on this a few months back. This is an herb that is in the "Buhner protocol". (Several people have a set of herbs figured out to help for lyme, Buhner is one of them.) I tried it. I felt like it helped me a little bit, but not greatly. I took it for probably a couple months, when it appeared it no longer was of any help for me. One of the benefits for lyme is to help strengthen the immune system, but it has the antibacterial antiviral type properties. It is something the native americans used successfully to avoid the influenza. I did not have any reactions to it on the skin. I do know someone else who took it and did develop the rash in about 5 days. It was uncomfortable and so on, it was a while back and don't remember too much of the details. The place that sold it provided information explaining that this does happen sometimes, particularly if you take too much too soon, and I think they said it was a kind of allergic reaction to the herb that would be a one-time event. At this point, I'm a little hesitant to believe this explanation, in that this same person also tried an herb, Enula, well known for being good to treat parasites/worms and babesia (a lyme coinfection). In a few days on Enula and her skin had perhaps hundreds of things that looked perhaps mostly like boils or really bad pimples. I am sure this was a result of toxins/die-off, as she did go too fast (as she had with the lomatium). And so I do wonder if maybe that skin rash from the lomatium was also toxins/die-off of something. This person found occasional good use of the lomatium as a one-time take-this to feel better kind of thing, does not have PANDAS, but does have lyme, which really means she has plenty of bacterial and viral and parasitic infections (plenty of opportunity for die-off). [side note, Stephanie, if you're still working on the kill-the-strep theory, and looking for herbal stabs in the dark to try, this might be on the list, as a stab in the dark though. No promises, I don't know that it is or isn't really strep that's your problem there, only that it has a history of dealing with influenza and that seems close.]

I imagine some lyme docs would. If you are headed there anyway, I would be looking there for your answer to this. If you're not headed to a lyme doc, then perhaps you really will need to get a proven strep test to get adequate treatment for it. But if a few abx over a couple days is enough to ruin the strep test while not fully killing the strep, then one positive strep test on one day may not buy you adequate treatment anyway--won't most docs want to stop the abx in a week or two if you have a negative strep test then? Then you'd be right back where you are now, anyway. The problem, and this is where the docs that stop abx too early are right at least in part, is that how do you know strep is really the main problem? Maybe something else, any number of bugs out there, is chronically weakening you, and so the strep reappears here and there once the main bug flourishes, since strep is everywhere and opportunistic. Then, treating you with strep abx forever may get you nowhere.

Someone was nice enough to transcribe a talk that Dr. Klinghardt gave at a seminar, now 5 years old. I saw this posted elsewhere and feel fairly confident she would be okay with it being posted here. For those of you unfamiliar, Dr. Klinghardt is a well known lyme doc, definitely in the "alternative" side of things, where he tries to do much treatment without abx (without completely staying away from them). The views he expressed here are not uniformly believed in the "lyme community", and perhaps not much is fully uniformly believed there, but, in any event, here it. There is lots to consider in here, whether you happen to believe it all or not. Also, 5 years ago, so not necessarily the case that Dr. K. fully believes this now either. Lyme Seminar 1/13/06 "Let me sort of clarify a couple of things at the beginning that may be helpful. One of the reasons why some of the more conventional medical types and universities are angry about us talking about Lyme Disease – main reason – they did not discover it first. The second reason has to do with the definition of what a disease is. Usually you have – psoriasis – that’s a very circumscribed sort of picture; you look at somebody and they have that skin thing and, a yes, he’s got psoriasis. Or somebody has hair loss – you look at them – it is a defined medical entity – you kind of look at them and you can see it. If somebody has Parkinsons, they have the rigid gate and rigid facial expressions and have a tremor – it is pretty narrow. With Lyme Disease, those of us that have been into it longer than others, find there is no illness that Lyme Disease isn’t part of or Lyme Disease can mimic or contribute to any illness that we know, including delayed healing of fractures, or hair loss for that matter, or bad eyesight. We have not found any illness where it is not involved. And therefore I have to site sort of with my more conventional colleagues -- to call it Lyme Disease, sort of makes it an oxymoron somehow, because it does not fulfill the criteria of a disease, of an illness. Are you with me on that? Let’s try and give a little compassion to those people who have been violently attacking us all over the place for reasons that are kind of strange. What benefit are they going to have out of it. I mean, is there going to be an argument by vote – does Lyme disease exist or not – three people are against it and one is for it; does it mean it doesn’t exist? Truth by vote or by expert opinion has never quite worked. The same history we really had with heavy metal toxicity, when I started out looking at heavy metals as an issue in illness, in almost all illnesses. The same problem was then – it was not one illness that was created by heavy metal toxicity, but was contributing or causing all of the known illnesses that we have and therefore because there was not one disease entity, I was viciously attacked in the 80’s and early 90’s for making the diagnosis of heavy metal toxicity on people. And many of the people that were attacking at the time, are now diagnosing it every day and treating people and – have known it all along that it is a big problem. So there is this evolution in medicine going on – that moves a little bit away from looking at one cause, causing one particular symptom picture, rather than looking at, when it comes to toxicity issue, that a toxin can work in such a fundamental deep level in our system that depending on certain cofactors, like your genetics, it can become the cause for everything. I can give you some examples: Recently we have been testing our autistic children for Lyme Disease with the Western Blot test, the standard conventional test if you want. And all of them, not some of them, all of them were positive. A. was there to witness that. We tested our patients with Parkinsons Disease: not some of them, all of them were testing positive on the Western Blot. But I go further than that: all of our cancer patients we tested in the last year for Lyme Disease; sometimes we had to repeat the test 2-3 times, all of them were positive on the Western Blot test. So I understand the trouble the conventional community has with this – that you are finding one microbe being involved in so many illnesses – that then half the people say, well, then it means this microbe is just coincidental and doesn’t have to do anything with it. That’s the one camp. And the other half of the more conventional people says – well, if you find this microbe positive in all these illnesses, that means the testing must be invalid. That is the other half of the conventional camp. So in this field, to find our way this that, has been adventure to say the least, and I am most grateful in this field to my original mentor in this work, that was Chris H., who is here – Chris show yourself. Chris and I worked together, we shared an office in 1992 and he was basically making the diagnosis – he was doing dental surgeries on people that had infections in the jawbone – and he was making the diagnosis of Lyme Disease in 1992 very, very frequently, two of three people I would say. At the time there was no decent lab work available at all. He was using muscle testing, just as I do for most of my diagnosing before we confirm it with a conventional test, I kind of initially suspected that it can’t be. I went through the same learning curve as the conventional medical community goes through now. I was first angry at him, then I was denying it, and I was trying to prove him wrong, and then I said to all my patients – well, I have known this all along. Laughter. I had the same arrogance and the same resistance to it. And it was really one of my patients, Gudrun here, who sits up here in front, who is also German, and she could see through my German arrogance very quickly and kind of said “Dietrich, come and sit down – I have got to talk to you.” And she gave me the lowdown on Lyme Disease and her experience with it – on the medical institutions, how they first of all failed to recognize what her illness was and then recognized it, treated it, treated it inappropriately, too short, too low doses, etc. When I went to medical school, one of the main things – when you treat an infection with antibiotics, the teaching is – you treat it hard with a high dose and with the right antibiotic that matches the illness. What we see with the Universities do with Lyme Disease, they are treating it with low doses, with the wrong antibiotic to start with, entraining the bugs that they become so resistant that later on when you actually get to use the right treatment, you have to use astronomical doses for astronomical amounts of time to undo the damage. I remember, it was only five years ago – four years ago – USA Today on the front page – John Hopkins found a cure for Lyme Disease – take 2 capsules of Doxy at night, and next morning you are cured. Front page – thick new discovery – less than five years ago. Let’s kind of be aware that this has been a thorny walk, but thanks to Christ I have been having an eye on this since 1992. Which is kind of funny – I did a residency in Neurology – short – I didn’t stay there, because the professor who was my teacher there was an old Nazi and I just couldn’t tolerate the environment. But he was making the diagnosis of Lyme Disease in 1973, consistently, on the people where we lived, in Freiburg in Germany, in the Black Forest, which turns out to be one of the most endemic areas for Babesia and Lyme Disease. I pretty much lost my Mom when I was eleven, because she became very severely ill, she couldn’t get out of bed, for years, had several bouts with having to be institutionalized for psychiatric bursts or various things, and she was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in the early eighties, long before it was really known here. She was successfully treated with IV antibiotics and never had a psychotic episode again. So I had some contact with this all along, long before most of you did. Now sort of looking back, before I show you some of the more formal stuff, my feeling is this: We know there are eight different genus of borrelia, and I will go into that later. Borrelia burgdorferi is just one sub-grouping in there. We are suspecting and there is good evidence that spirochetes have been causing human disease for at least 30,000 years. So this is not a new illness. And many of the symptoms of premature aging, that we always assumed were age related, like when you get cataracts, different eye disorders, become myopic, or many of the cancers, or many of the osteoporoses, we find very very often being a cause by Lyme Disease. I will go into that later – the collagen breakdown – and how that all works. A couple of my colleagues and me believe that this illness has been with us forever. However, what is new is the aggressive behavior of the bugs. They have not behaved like this. They are getting increasingly aggressive in the way they are causing symptoms in us – that is new. I hope that by the end of this meeting, you will get an idea why this is --- it has to do with the synergistic cofactors, other toxins that are increasingly displacing our human potential, increasingly filled up with toxic material, and in that milieu change that we have, the microbes have changed their behavior. They used to be very synergistic in our system, in a probably beneficial way. One of the speakers I wish I had here this weekend is Gitte Jensen. Some of you may know here. She is a microbiologist, very, very high level, in Oregon, has her own lab. But she was at Mc… University in Canada. She basically found out that there is a constant exchange of DNA going on between human cells and microbes. That the human being organism is constantly evolving, a constant inter-exchange, is not separate from our microbial environment. And that the microbes that are in us are constantly communicating with out DNA and exchangeing forth and back with us. The microbes are trying to establish that we become a comfortable host, but also that we live as long as healthy as possible, because they are also benefiting from that. That in Lyme Disease, things certainly have gone wrong. The symbiotic arrangement has gone wrong. We want to look at some of these causes – why that is. The interesting thing that I like to give you at the beginning that at the end of this seminar you are sort of coming back to, that everything we have done in alternative medicine over the last thirty years is valid. The only thing that changes is that the focus is a little more on the microbes in us than it was. But the same homeopathics work for Lyme Disease that always worked before we named it Lyme Disease; the same herbs and vitamins work that we have always given without knowing that we are actually treating Lyme Disease. The same acupuncture points work that always worked. We are coming back to all that, but having in mind that we actually are treating a microbial illness and the outcome of it in the body. By changing the focus in treatment just a little bit and including the microbes and our immune system response to it, we have made great great progress in being able to help a lot of people, and I hope I am going to be able to bring it across here. To give you a little introduction I am going to steel a little bit of knowledge from my friend, Lee Cowden, he gave me last year. This picture. Just a bit about recent discovery of Borrelia burgdorferi. (Dr. K. goes into detail of the 300 different borrelia types.) Explains picture: This is a White Cell – being attacked by spirochetes. Now – what’s wrong with the picture? What’s wrong with the picture is that it is usually the other way around: that the White Cells are attacking the spirochetes. Not the spirochetes attacking the White Cells. Really this picture captures the core of what this group of illnesses is about. They are going after our immune system first, and immobilize it. And then everything is possible. It not unlike AIDS. In AIDS we experience that first. Remember this, this is different from any other illness that we know. Usually, in illnesses you see the White Cells looking for bugs. This is the bugs looking for the White Cell. Does this White Cell have a chance to fight them? The picture is very similar – it reminds me, in Africa, sometimes you see a pack of dogs hunting down a lion, killing a lion; if you have one lion and one dog, the dog doesn’t have a chance. But if you got 50 dogs and one lion, the lion doesn’t stand a chance. That is what is happening with Lyme Disease. This picture (one White Cell surrounded by many spirochetes) really expresses everything about it. In this illness we cannot count on the immune system to recover on its own. All these techniques that we have to stimulate the immune system…….What do you want to stimulate here??????..... You can’t give this guy coffee or whatever stimulates you can give to this White Cell ---- is not going to succeed in killing the bugs around it. The numbers are overwhelming. And so – this is the illness where we need to kind of come in with some antimicrobial agents, whether plant based (as later) or man-made. But immune-stimulant therapies are a joke. It is not going to work. I am not going to go into the transmissions, etc. with the ticks. I will show you later that fleas, biting flys, mosquitos, all the stinging insects transfer Lyme Disease. What is unique with the ticks --- there is only one unique thing about them ---- that in the tick saliva that are a lot of incredible factors that help the Lyme spirochete to propagate themselves for the first few days and set up the housekeeping in the body very quickly. So a tick bite is highly highly tansmissive for these infections, whereas a mosquito bite, even though they are full of the same bugs is less transmissive. That means you need probably three or four mosquito bites instead of one tick bite. The question right now is not anymore – have you ever been bitten by a tick. The question is – is it possible you were ever bitten by a mosquito? Laughter. I will show you the evidence for that. Sexual intercourse we know now is high transmissive of the Lyme spirochete. In fact, I have a number of patients they report an interesting symptom: They make love to their wife and for the next two days their urethra burns. The bugs sense when you make love and they are accumulating in the urethra for their chance of propagating themselves and infecting another person. They are highly highly intelligent. That is proven. I am not making this up. The bugs sense whenever there is a possibility of propagating somewhere else – that’s where they accumulate. If you have that symptom, for me it has become diagnostic, when somebody reports it. Men sense that more because their urethra is a little longer and smaller; people have recurrent herpes outbreaks (genital herpes outbreaks) – that’s one of the tell-tale signs because the immune system is locally surpressed in the area from the Lyme spirochete and the toxins they are giving off. Unfortunately, transplacental transfer is now proven. We had a very tragic case of a woman, she gave birth to four or five babies. All of them were born healthy; all of them developed seizures within the first hour of life and died within the first six months of life. Except one. And in that one child, I accompanied the pregnancy and treated here completely coincidentally with various courses of antibiotics for other reasons (I thought other reasons) and that child came out healthy. Now we did the Western Blot test on her and she was highly positive on Lyme Disease and so is her husband. No symptoms whatsoever, but the only symptom there was losing the babies, very tragically , healthy born babies, but they were metabolically damaged – nobody could figure it out, including myself. They died young. You have to be aware of that --- if you accompany pregnancies as a physician, it is no longer allowed not to look at Lyme Disease. You need to know if your pregnant Mom ……………I just got through with another pregnancy, a friend of mine from Canada, she was positive for Lyme Disease. And we put her on the herbal treatment, ignoring all the herbal rules; we put her on PC-Samento which is not allowed during pregnancy; we put her on PC -Noni which is not allowed during pregnancy ----- nothing is allowed during pregnancy, but if you don’t treat it, you have a crippled child, or a crippled adult if it makes it into adulthood. The herbal treatments have turned out to be extremely safe, the herbal treatments that I am recommending, and have worked beautifully in accompanying the pregnancy. In Germany, I have a large indirect practice there – over a thousand physicians who follow my guidance and so my experience that I am sharing is not just based on what I do here, but is based on the feedback I am getting from a large group of practitioners. So just kind of be aware of that – it is not a one-man show that I am representing here. Unpasteurized milk. That’s a big one. Because pasteurizing milk makes it almost undigestible for most of us and not pasteurizing it is ---- from all the cows that we ever tested – they were infected with Lyme Disease. You are not going to find a single cow in the US without having Ehrlichiosis, Babesia and Lyme Disease. I tested through a friend, a vet, many cows. He could not find a single one that is not infected. So cow’s milk has Lyme Disease in it. If you pasteurize it, most of the Lyme bugs die, not all of them, some of them in cysts, and you get the Lyme cysts and they survive into you. Breast feeding is another big one. If you have a Mom with Lyme Disease and she is breastfeeding. I have stopped a few Moms from breastfeeding. I know it is an unpopular thought. We are checking two things in breastmilk. We are checking PBDE’s – that’s a chemical from flame retardant that’s now in all breastmilk. Breastmilk is fat, FDA study on it that shows in general American breastmilk is now so toxic that you are not allowed to flush it down the toilet. If you want to dispose of it, it has to be disposed of in a special landfill when you take the toxic criteria of breastmilk – of the general established criteria for it. The PBDE’s – we are checking for that with a lab in Texas…………..it’s a little bit difficult because it needs to be in a glass container, the early milk that shows it the best, you send it in.. Unfortunately we find it in most women in high levels. You need to also be aware that when Mom has Lyme Disease and toxic milk for other reasons, it may be a good idea not to breastfeed. I am taking that position today, I may change it again. But just the general push that breastfeeding is better than not breastfeeding is just not true anymore from a scientific point of view. It was a complete lie in the sixties, when we told women to not breastfeed. But today, breastmilk is mostly fat and fat accumulates fat soluble toxins, and so breastmilk has become a dangerous item and it is a very, very difficult decision to make. We had a baby two years ago, of course we breastfed, and we found that you can completely clean up the breastmilk from the environmental toxins by giving Mom a high dose of chlorella. That is something we have shown. In fact, the breastmilk turns green if you give Mom a lot of chlorella. Breastmilk gets a greenish shine to it showing that the chlorella does end up in the greastmilk. We did a couple of breastmilks and could show that it completely removes the known toxins from it --- which is a wonderful discovery. But we also know that Lyme Disease is passed on and it’s not every day; it follows the lunar cycle, so every time the full moon comes, your Lyme cysts and spirochetes are transmitted to the breastmilk and into the fetus and we know that most babies handle it well. Most babies are asymptomatic until high up into their teens before the symptoms start. But they may start earlier and earlier because of the co-toxicity from other issues. Lyme spirochetes form cysts when they are in danger or when they are outside the body and these cysts can be exposed to open flames, open fire, they will survive that. There is no known way of killing Lyme cysts. I think that is a very important pearl for you, because when we treat people with antibiotics or any other treatments we cannot sterilize the body. We canmot eradicate the bugs from the body once they establish themselves. We can push it back from time to time. We can try to create a more harmonious relationship with them, but we cannot get rid of them. Even incinerating your body does not get rid of the Lyme Disease in it. So – what else do you want to do to try to get rid of it? Picture. This is a very nice thing Lee Cowden did for us. Lee Cowden is a great physician in Dallas. Wonderful doctor. He is the guy that I recommend overthere. Here is the link to MS and polyneuropathies. Also brain tumors. I have seen one child – that was about a year ago – brain tumor with a little psychological stuff - he lost his mom when he was two years old – it was very tragic. We did a test for Lyme Disease and sure enough it was positive on Western Blot. There is a high relationship, with children especially, with brain tumors. I talked to B. and older guys that do wonderful work for brain tumors, they never heard of Lyme Disease. Yet in Germany every child I tested in the last few years, the brain tumors, about 20-30 of them. I would say 90% of them or so tested positive for Lyme, on the first try, with using the Western Blot. A huge relationship. MS relationship. Most of you here are already touched by that or know that. On the first round of testing, when you do one Western Blot test, about 66% of people with MS test positive for Borrelia. And when you repeat the test often enough you find it in everyone with MS. Am I saying that MS is caused by Lyme disease? ----- you make up your own mind on that one. Usually, we know a couple of patterns now: MS is Lyme Disease plus Herpes Type 8. ALS is Lyme Disease plus Mycoplasma plus two or three other things, usually Bartonella is in there, Bartonella, Borrelia, Mycoplasma. It will come down in a few years just to a question of symptoms, you get two bugs here and one there, and maybe a little bit of arsenic and a little bit of mercury, you get this illness --- always against the genetic background of the person. But you can kind of always establish a biological mathematics now, with the different illnesses and different toxins, put them together and you will create a certain ………..of illnesses. We are close to that. I loved it when a few weeks ago, the Australian guy got the Nobel Prize for discovering that stomach ulcers are caused by H-Pylori: I was teaching in the eighties in Australia and I was just there after he had done his first publication on it – I was just there teaching at the University of Sidney teaching Prolo-Therapy – when I heard about this weird guy and he just had lost his license. It was not at all mentioned when he got the Nobel Prize – but this guy actually lost his license for discovering that stomach ulcers are caused by H-Pylori ---- then a year later it was reinstalled when some friend at the University repeated the study just to redeem his license – he just wanted to help him, he didn’t care about the H-Pylori – he just wanted to help his friend – he confirmed the results, because of that he got his license back, and now he got the Nobel Prize for it. I thought this was great. That really showed that the Nobel people in Sweden - they are good people, they know the trend in politics and know who to support a little bit. Here is a big one: Schizophrenia, anorexia and dementia. I had a – last time I was in Europe in October-November, I had four young girls that were brought to me with anorexia, all of them with the muscle testing (ART) tested positive for Lyme Disease. All of them are now confirmed with a simple MELISA test being positive for Lyme Disease, and all of them are already (two months) are already responding to IV antibiotics with dramatic improvement. Zinc has to be added to that cocktail. Zinc and abx is a treatment of anorexia. I think it is going to take another 100 years in this country to get that idea across. We had a young man in Europe that – beautiful – with episodes of schizophrenia. About three years ago we diagnosed him with Lyme Disease. We put him on my treatment for schizophrenia which is high doses of niacin, Abraham Hoffer’s treatment or Linus Pauling or all together . High doses of niacin is a wonderful antibiotic for Lyme Disease and then we put him on Vitam C and Salt treatment some of you have heard about in addition to that. He never had that episode again – he had like an episode every three four months, had to be hospitalized, and he is now three years schizophrenia-free. That is very very hard. Schizophrenias that come on in late teens, early twenties, are very hard to treat or used to be very hard to treat before we knew there is an infection involved. Usually, localized deposits of mercury and viral infections in the brain are a big part of that. (A participant brought up schizo in a relative that was treated successfully with antiparasitics). There is a parasitologist in Mexico City, Hilda Hildalgo, she is sort of the main parasitologist for all of the Southamerican countries – In fact she is in charge of the doctors that treat 800 million people. So not a small…… Supposedly since yesterday we have 300 million people here. Hilda found that many cases of schizo are caused by parasite larvae in the brain and actually developed a special modification of the functional MRI where she can often show those areas in the brain. She turned me on to the idea of treating these often young people with Alinia. In other countries called Daxon. A nitro compound. A nitro version of an anilin dye that is the only anti-parasitic that crosses the blood brain barrier very easily. It can clear especially in teenagers that have the erratic psychotic outbreaks ------ always suspect parasites in their brain. Of course to do the treatment bioenergetically, you have to know a lot more. Anyone can write a prescription. But to treat it more elegantly with EAV or kinesiology based, you have to know a little bit more. Chronic Fatique – I don’t think we have ever seen an exception to it – that did not have a Western Blot confirmed Lyme Disease, rare. Same with Fibromyalgia. Parkinson I already mentioned. Most MS and ALS you will find Borrelia in the CSF. Here an interesting one: there are only 24% of Lyme Disease patients have arthritis. So arthritis was the original symptom that triggered the search for the bugs in this country and the modern discovery of Borrelia burgdorferi started with a bunch of arthritic kids in Lyme, Conn. Therefore, falsely, it has been associated in the minds of many physicians --- if you don’t have arthritis, you can’t have Lyme Disease. But it’s actually only 24-25% of people that have any arthritic symptoms. Go into detail later. Sarcoidosis, I will go into later with the Marshall protocol To say out front, the Marshall protocol has been largely disappointing – it is not the cure that we were hoping it would be. We have one patient that actually was diagnosed with Sarcoidosis before we had him, and he is actually doing very well on it. So it does work for Sarcoidosis, but it works very rarely for Lyme patients. More later. Lyme Carditis is a very, very serious condition. In fact, a few months ago we lost one of our patients. I had seen her only once. A young woman, late twenties, who already had the diagnosis of Lyme Carditis. Cardiac arrest. End. Do not take Lyme Carditis lightly. I was not aware of ……….. she was clinically presenting a mild case, but with some cardiac symptoms, and I certainly took that too lightly. We recommend --- So if you have a patient with cardiac symptoms, first of all, no matter what age group they are in, always suspect Lyme Disease as a part of the picture. It can cause anything – it starts with the rhythm, problems with the heart, the different episodes of arrhythmia, irregular heartbeat, all the way to angina, or true involvement of the heart cardiac muscle. We know there is a tremendous synergistic effect with heavy metal toxicity. We know people with cardiopmyopathy that had an elevation of mercury in the heart muscle of 22,000 times higher than normal. These are young people, athletes, that have developed cardiac arrhythmias and were diagnosed with cardiac myopathy, their heart is dilated; Italian researchers did biopsies on the heart (mentions name) – she found an average of 22,000 times mercury in the heart muscles. Average. If these people get Lyme Disease, they get dramatically symptomatic and have need to be treated radically and quickly with everything that we know in order to get them through. References are here if you need them. Unfortunately early reports on Lyme Disease were that it doesn’t cause any fetal trouble. Now reports are coming in, pouring in from every country that most of the pregnancy problems that we have known about seem to be caused or aggravated by Lyme Disease, by spirochetes in the system. Toxemia. We used to treat toxemia with magnesium --------life style changes. ----- We are coming back to this. We cannot treat Lyme Disease without doing all these things also. But by actually recognizing that there is an infection involved. We have a much better outcome in the pregnancies. It takes on average about 24 months before Lyme Disease becomes neurological. We know it takes from a tick bite before spirochetes set up their housekeeping in the brain several hours. Even after a tick bite, thinking that you can treat someone for a week or two with a capsule or two of doxycycline, is a joke. Because doxy does not cross the blood brain barrier in a significant amount. The bugs that are in there within 3-4 hours after the tickbite, they are in the brain. But to actually become symptomatic with it, the brain fog, the memory problems, all the things the chronic neurological Lyme patient has, which is many of us here in the room, takes about two years – for the first symptoms to appear. And then they sort of gradually over the years accelerate and then stabilize on a certain level and usually stay there. The neurological form of Lyme Disease initially, in an objective way, we can show with a PET scan or Spect scan very early, especially circulatory problems in the fronto cortex – as the first symptom. I had that for years without knowing what was going on – through it was frontal sinsusitis; I learned everything about the sinuses there is to learn in the world and none of it worked. And then one of my practitioners in Germany, one of my students, tested me with the Lyme slide and said “you got Lyme Disease in the frontal lobe, we need to treat this”. She gave me a few injections and it cleared it up just like that. With some of the Heel remedies – using some of the stuff that increases microcirculation in the brain. But I had it for years without knowing what the heck was going on. There are really six expressions of Lyme Disease, I will get into later. Depending on your genetics – in some people it goes into the joints, some people it goes into the connective tissue; other people it’s just affecting the immune system; with other people it is just affecting their neurology. It has six different routes it goes through. Other people have just a skin manifestation, and the main symptom there is premature aging of the skin. Some of you here know who you are, that you have that, but you have never put it in association with Lyme Disease ---- Lyme disease propagates itself in the system, it needs to break down the collagen. It’s a collagen disease – Lyme Disease lives in collagen, it feeds on collagen. Actually those of you who have been in my seminar on the Matrix Therapy, the main constituent of the connective tissue are called GAGS or Glucosaminoglycans; that’s what Lyme spirochetes eat. They eat GAGS. They live off the G;lucosaminoglycans, off the matrix, the substance that maintains our skin, our muscle, our bone structure. They eat that. And it breaks down skin, it breaks down bones, osteoporosis, breaks down muscle. It looks like aging. It comes on fairly suddenly. Suddenly, within a year they look twice as old as you looked before. That’s Lyme Disease, how it behaves. Your immune system is holding it, holding it, holding it – and finally –crash."

I think there are so many different infections out there, your family has been dealing with at least some. Trying to look one month forward here, I'm having trouble imagining the future where it is going to be important to anyone trying to treat you that you did or did not test positive for strep in a day or so. I really recommend that if you think taking some abx now is going to help out short-term, you/kids/everybody, then go on and do it. Wishing you the best in this difficult time!

I don't think you'll be able to get Alinia compounded here in the US. I tried a few months ago when I found out they have aluminum in them (for the coloring of course!), and was unable to. I believe it is still under patent, which prevents the compounding pharmacies from getting the generic drug. Whenever running into this issue, though, it is good to remember about the compounding pharmacies. They can be a lot cheaper, and as a bonus you can avoid some additional bad ingredients. Yes, plenty of pharmacies out there. I do believe most will want a prescription, but sounds like that's no problem given your situation. I do believe there are pharmacies out there that do not require a prescription, but I think they are a bit harder to find.

If someone is sensitive, all electrical wiring, and certainly any kind of boxes where things come into the house can matter. They matter more when it is where someone is spending a lot of time or sleeping (sleeping is quite important!). There are plenty of measuring devices out there, some can measure one thing, some can measure multiple things. It's pretty complicated out there! Whenever I want to go serious about something like this, I call LessEMF (lessemf.com). I have found them good at being able to explain things to someone who doesn't know much about the topic. If you tell them your situation and goal and what you're looking to measure, they can recommend which of their meters would be a good choice. They also sell a variety of things that can be used to shield, which is something you may want to consider (paint, cloth, sheet metal, ...). The meter can help confirm the strength of the EMF's you have, verify that it's worth the effort to sheild it, and then verify how well the shielding works once it's installed. I am sure there are many places that sell meters and shields for this purpose. The first place I stumbled on was lessemf and I have been so pleased that I haven't looked elsewhere. So, for anyone pleased with anyplace else, I'm sure other places are fine too.

Finding a vegetarian miso should be quite easy. Most are vegan, basically fermented soy and/or grains, and plenty of sea salt.

Yes, CD57 is one that a lot of lab techs have trouble with. It may help to have the "HNK1" code with you, to help them find it. The "NK" in HNK1 stands for natural killer cells, which is what is being measured.

Transfer factor, or NT factor, not really sure, is recommended in the ILADS treatment guidelines document authored by Dr. Burrascano. It is not vegan, so I have not used it myself. But, I will say, I have tried many of the things listed there, and while I didn't need nearly the large quantities he recommends, a great many of the things he listed there were very good for me. So, financial stake or not, I suspect this product will be very good for many with lyme.

I don't know your whole story, but lyme can cause any variety of neurological and psychological symptoms, depression is definitely a symptom for some. I think in most cases, yes, the thing to do is to treat the lyme and then see what symptoms fix themselves. Of course, the depression could be from another cause, but you'll find out with treatment. The other side of that is, sometimes the symptoms are so bad that they do need treatment by themselves while one works on fixing the lyme. It depends on how bad the symptom is. For example, if the heart is not working well enough, or the person is having seizures, or even severe depression to the point where suicide is a risk, then, even if the cause may be lyme, you need to do what you can in the meantime.

If I were you, I think I would be calling to ask if it is complete, and then when the test actually was done on the sample. If you're lucky, the rep will have that info available and maybe you can end up discussing why you're asking, and maybe the rep will be able to see what the time limit on that one is supposed to be.

philamom, Do you know what the problem is with flagyl and milk thistle, taking them both? I am currently taking milk thistle and tinidazole (aka tindamax), a cyst buster similar to flagyl I would suppose. I hadn't heard anything about these combinations being a problem.

Ignoring delays related to getting the results to the doctor and then to you, the CD57 results are actually really quick--just 2-3 days. The reason is, what is needed for the CD57 deteriorates really quickly, so they must process it right away. For that reason, in some locations, it's bad to have the blood draw on Thursday or Friday, because the blood will be spoiled before they get to running the test.

I've had acid reflux yo-yo-ing from mild to severe over many years, and never had that one.

I always have that one from treatment, yes.

The lyme treatment guidelines document available on the ILADS website, written by Dr. Burrascano, probably a couple/few years old now, provide a lot of excellent advice, some including things on supplements and diet that you can get started on now.

I've followed your case enough to have the opinion at this point, it looks a lot like lyme to me, but, if it is or isn't, still makes sense to try lyme treatment, see where it goes, yes, it could treat something else and you'd never know. Opinions from docs are all across the board on the CD57, who knows. I know it's really tracked the ups and downs for me, so I see the value in it for people that it works that way with. It's a test I think ideally you would get periodically to help track treatment, or at least see if it can help track treatment, because it can help you decide when to stop. I'd recommend definitely don't do it if you think your doc would withhold treatment based on a "normal" result. But that depends on what you know about where the doc is headed. It's ideal to get it before any treatment starts, because once treatment starts, you won't know how the treatment affected things. But, still, not really critical, for a 10yo, I wouldn't rush him in to get pricked one more time for that, but, maybe, next time you're having blood, have it be LabCorp and get that on the order. With insurance, for me, when done with other tests, it ends up costing like $6.

You might consider having her checked for lyme (not just a regular doc checking off a test on the labcorp form, but a real expert in lyme who will consider clinical symptoms and tests to consider this possibility).

As someone who has had so many rages and other serious memory problems from these things, I just want to second the idea for people to give this a try and see what happens. The thing is, now, it is getting harder and harder to do a real experiment these days. These wireless things are just spiraling out of control everywhere. For example, don't forget that laptops have an on/off switch or button to enable use of a wireless router. Even if you turn the wireless router off, the laptop will still, every few seconds, send out a wireless signal, unless you turn the laptop switch off. And home security systems, more and more public buildings these days, on and on...

FYI, you do not have to sweat for it to work.

I would not waste the effort with the ova and parasites test. If there is lyme, it is best to simply assume the parasites and worms are there. The tests are reputedly 10% accurate, meaning, if you have them, they will find them 10% of the time. I think the real number is probably something like 0.1% accurate. Dr. K. does recommend doing that first, and I agree with that, particularly with gut issues, unless you need drastic improvement immediately. I've had diarrhea since March because of abx, and I really have started to get better now, after treating for parasites/worms (or at least starting this). At least for me, the things that we have all been blaming candida/fungus on, have finally improved with parasite/worm treatment. Starting out with abx really kills so much that it really lets the worms/parasites get a bigger stronghold, and that's why hitting them first can make the treatment so much better in the long term. It is good to be careful with the heavy metals. I think a lot of the caution comes from people using substances to chelate, and it ends up just moving the metal around, because the body still does not recognize the metals as bad. So, the Allergie Immun approach is much safer than other methods, and an excellent place to start, once one is ready to deal with heavy metals. Still, I had quite the pimples and headaches, even using a variety of binders (cholestryamine, chlorella, ...). Regardless of method, it is important to use binders and be a bit careful when going with heavy metals. The beginning of treatment, perhaps it makes sense not to do everything all at once, as it can be too much to handle. As all the bad things help each other stay there, I do think, towards the end of treatment, it's great to go after everything. But, yes, slow at first does make sense.

Western blot is a common diagnostic test done for lyme. IGeneX is more expensive than LabCorp but higher quality, i.e., lower change of false negative. ELISA is another one, again, I think IGeneX has one of these, if not, LabCorp has one. The important things to remember is that NONE of the lyme tests are close to perfect. The diagnosis, or lack thereof, is best done by someone trained and experienced in treating lyme. ILADS is one organization that gives referrals for such doctors.

This is might be a little of the train you were thinking on, but it is in the category of things you can do to help gut health and digestive issues. One treatment I have used and am very pleased with comes from a company called Allergie-Immun, in Germany. They test your saliva for "errors in your DNA", and then provide energy-information drops (kind of homeopathic, but not precisely that) to "correct the errors". The main benefits for lyme patients tend to be: (1) help detoxify heavy metals, and (2) help remove food allergies. This company believes many health issues are ultimately tied to autoimmunity, and the purpose of the treatment is to help the body recognize things for what they are and deal with them accordingly. For heavy metals and other nasty chemicals, help the body to recognize they should be removed. Starting this treatment frequently involves a lot of pimples, maybe some headaches, and other detoxing. For foods, teach the body they are to be digested, not attacked. It can take several months, but many report fewer food sensitivities and better digestion after a while. Last I knew, it cost 450 euros to get started, plus 10 euros per bottle of drops they send beyond the first bottle. There is also a way to just spend 90 euros to get a report on what the saliva is saying at the moment, and then this can be applied toward the 450 if desired. This has helped a lot. I imagine this will sound kooky to several folks, and I do just want to point out, you can read that having an infection in general (and certainly lyme disease) does change a person's DNA. And, of course, autoimmunity is a big aspect of lyme disease, at least once a person has had it for a while. As an FYI, there is an absolutely huge thread on this allergie-immun therapy on the lymenet board.

I'm also interested to see frequent urination and trouble swallowing on there, as those have been issues with me, along with some others. Some here may remember great lengths of discussion there was on the TS board in the spring/summer of 2009 regarding curing TS with a device to adjust the jaw, similar to how TMJ is treated. The theory was that this allows the trigeminal nerve, another important one, to not be aggravated, when correcting the location of how some of the bones have grown. These devices have really helped some people with TS a lot, basically eliminating painful and nonstop and exhausting tics. I did get one of these devices in July 2009, and it immediately reduced my anxiety, so it was helpful. Apparently these nerves can be important! Looking at the situation with the lyme glasses now, I hear that TMJ issues with lyme patients are not at all uncommon, and of course these nerves are of the nature of tissue where the lyme bugs like to hang out. The adjustment that my device gives me is far beyond what anyone would suggest--indeed, far beyond what a TMJ dentist and a "natural" dentist would recommend in terms of lining things up the way they were "meant to be". But, I needed that adjustment at the time, the dentist who did it actually tested lesser adjustments and they were not nearly as good. I do still wear the device, but do now have hope that after the lyme treatment is done, I will not need this or any other adjustment. (And very glad I didn't follow up after 6 months by starting with a more permanent orthodontic solution! My perspective was that while it helped with some symptoms, I still had other severe ones, and so I didn't know that the adjustment was "right".)