coinfections
Can antibiotics heal Lyme disease?
// Filed in: Lyme Disease Treatment
Can antibiotics heal Lyme disease?
Yes. If Lyme is detected early on, antibiotics can be effective in stopping the infection and killing the bug.
But what if you’ve completed antibiotic treatment, and you still feel more zombie than human? Quality of life matters.
When you dig a little further, you find that Lyme disease is often complicated by many factors. So it makes sense that Lyme is difficult to treat with just one pharmaceutical drug.
For one thing, the nasty co-infections that can accompany Lyme infection may go unresolved.
Research increasingly shows that a tick bite often downloads additional pathogens along with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme. Co-infections such as Babesia and Bartonella seem to be the rule, and not the exception, for people with Lyme.
So why do most doctors take this one-drug-for-one-bug approach to treatment?
The answer is, as in so many cases, because that’s what they’ve always done.
It’s historical.
One drug for one bug
Monotherapy is the treatment of a condition by means of a single pharmaceutical drug. This idea of “one drug for one bug” was developed after World War II. Monotherapy came into use with the “first generation” antibacterials, as some epidemiologists and researchers refer to them.
But humans, our systems, and our environment, have evolved since the 1940s.
Consider the communication system. The computers my dad worked on in the 60s were as large as my kitchen, and had a fraction of the capacity of my smartphone.
Back then, people even had to get up and walk to the telephone.
Bacteria evolves too. Lyme and its co-infections are a new challenge for doctors as well as patients. These bacteria are stealth pathogens, with the ability to evade the immune system and antibiotics.
Outsmarting the smart bugs
Monotherapy offers only one weapon against the complexity of a Lyme infection.
Lyme, Babesia, and other co-infections are newly emerging infections, sometimes called “second generation” infections. These difficult-to-cure diseases require more holistic and complex approaches to treatment.
Stephen Buhner, author of Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections, questions the sole dependence on antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.
“Technological medicine,” he says, “while a great adjunct, is not capable, at this point in time (if it ever will be), of dealing with this second generation of infectious agents.”
Especially when it is not detected in the early stage, many of us find that Lyme is not an easy disease to cure.
Plant medicine is considered by alternative medicine practitioners to be a smart healing ally, because as living organisms, herbs evolve right along with bacteria.
Get a handle on it
For me, killing the Lyme bacterial complex—as I call the numerous pathogens that we call Lyme—has been an ongoing challenge that has transformed my life. I have to say, it hasn’t been an altogether bad thing.
I try all feasible pathways to vitality and good health. My focus is on healing through daily attention to body, mind, and spirit. Most precious of all, I have a better handle on what truly matters.
I’ve had much good luck with herbs and plant medicine over the years since battling Lyme and its co-infections. Although I’d be the first to tell you to run to the ER with a severe infection—because that ain’t nothing to mess with—I consider herbal medicine one of my primary allies in staying healthy in my life post-Lyme.
Co-infections complicate Lyme. They can muck up the healing process and delay the gift of living a vibrant life.
Plants might be able to help. Most people I know who've healed from Lyme have taken herbal medicines along with their standard protocol. According to Stephen Buhner and other herbalists I've interviewed, there is generally no problem with taking herbs at the same time as taking pharmaceuticals. But as always, I recommend asking your doctor or medical team for their opinion before doing so.
“Those with co-infections tend to be sicker longer, have more difficult symptoms, possess a lower quality of life, and are much less likely to heal from the use of monotherapies such as antibiotics,” says Buhner.
Get well soon!
Yes. If Lyme is detected early on, antibiotics can be effective in stopping the infection and killing the bug.
But what if you’ve completed antibiotic treatment, and you still feel more zombie than human? Quality of life matters.
When you dig a little further, you find that Lyme disease is often complicated by many factors. So it makes sense that Lyme is difficult to treat with just one pharmaceutical drug.
For one thing, the nasty co-infections that can accompany Lyme infection may go unresolved.
Research increasingly shows that a tick bite often downloads additional pathogens along with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme. Co-infections such as Babesia and Bartonella seem to be the rule, and not the exception, for people with Lyme.
So why do most doctors take this one-drug-for-one-bug approach to treatment?
The answer is, as in so many cases, because that’s what they’ve always done.
It’s historical.
One drug for one bug
Monotherapy is the treatment of a condition by means of a single pharmaceutical drug. This idea of “one drug for one bug” was developed after World War II. Monotherapy came into use with the “first generation” antibacterials, as some epidemiologists and researchers refer to them.
But humans, our systems, and our environment, have evolved since the 1940s.
Consider the communication system. The computers my dad worked on in the 60s were as large as my kitchen, and had a fraction of the capacity of my smartphone.
Back then, people even had to get up and walk to the telephone.
Bacteria evolves too. Lyme and its co-infections are a new challenge for doctors as well as patients. These bacteria are stealth pathogens, with the ability to evade the immune system and antibiotics.
Outsmarting the smart bugs
Monotherapy offers only one weapon against the complexity of a Lyme infection.
Lyme, Babesia, and other co-infections are newly emerging infections, sometimes called “second generation” infections. These difficult-to-cure diseases require more holistic and complex approaches to treatment.
Stephen Buhner, author of Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections, questions the sole dependence on antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.
“Technological medicine,” he says, “while a great adjunct, is not capable, at this point in time (if it ever will be), of dealing with this second generation of infectious agents.”
Especially when it is not detected in the early stage, many of us find that Lyme is not an easy disease to cure.
Plant medicine is considered by alternative medicine practitioners to be a smart healing ally, because as living organisms, herbs evolve right along with bacteria.
Get a handle on it
For me, killing the Lyme bacterial complex—as I call the numerous pathogens that we call Lyme—has been an ongoing challenge that has transformed my life. I have to say, it hasn’t been an altogether bad thing.
I try all feasible pathways to vitality and good health. My focus is on healing through daily attention to body, mind, and spirit. Most precious of all, I have a better handle on what truly matters.
I’ve had much good luck with herbs and plant medicine over the years since battling Lyme and its co-infections. Although I’d be the first to tell you to run to the ER with a severe infection—because that ain’t nothing to mess with—I consider herbal medicine one of my primary allies in staying healthy in my life post-Lyme.
Co-infections complicate Lyme. They can muck up the healing process and delay the gift of living a vibrant life.
Plants might be able to help. Most people I know who've healed from Lyme have taken herbal medicines along with their standard protocol. According to Stephen Buhner and other herbalists I've interviewed, there is generally no problem with taking herbs at the same time as taking pharmaceuticals. But as always, I recommend asking your doctor or medical team for their opinion before doing so.
“Those with co-infections tend to be sicker longer, have more difficult symptoms, possess a lower quality of life, and are much less likely to heal from the use of monotherapies such as antibiotics,” says Buhner.
Get well soon!
Stephen Harrod Buhner on mycoplasmas and coinfections
// Filed in: Lyme Disease Bacteria|Lyme Disease Diagnosis|Lyme Disease Coinfections|Lyme Disease Treatment|Lyme Disease|Lyme Disease Symptoms
When standard antibiotic treatment fails, many of us give holistic or complementary protocols a try. It takes determination to battle the stealth pathogens associated with Lyme and its coinfections. Where pharmaceuticals bombard the body, herbs are more elegant and complex. They work synergistically when encountering these organisms.
As Stephen Harrod Buhner says, “The bacteria are evolving, we need to, too.”
Buhner, master herbalist and author, is well-known to many in the Lyme community for his informative, meticulously researched, and beautifully written books. His popular Lyme protocol has helped scores of Lyme patients, as it picks up where technological medicine leaves off.
His new work, Healing Lyme Disease Coinfections is a reference book for people struggling with these common Lyme coinfections. There is increasing evidence that coinfections such as Bartonella and mycoplasmas are the rule, not the exception, when Lyme is present. How do these coinfections behave in the body, and what can be done to alleviate the problems they create?
Q: Who would you like to read this book, and what do you want them to walk away knowing?
A: Well, the book was written for both people with Lyme and Lyme coinfections and for health professionals and I tried to make it accessible to both groups. These kinds of emerging infections are what some epidemiologists and researchers are calling “second generation” infections. “First generation” are those bacteria that antibacterials were developed for after world war II. In essence, technological medicine already dealt with the easy ones.
The emerging infections, among which are included Lyme and its coinfections, are much more difficult. They tend to be stealth pathogens, much more clever when they infect the body, and they take a different approach. Technological medicine, while a great adjunct, is not capable, at this point in time (if it ever will be), of dealing with this second generation of infectious agents.
So, the purpose of the book is twofold. First: to begin giving a good general sense of how these infectious agents behave and why they do so. This takes a lot of the mystique away from them, lowers the fear level, and allows an intelligent response to treating them. This creates empowerment both for healing professionals and those who are infected.
Second: The standard medical model for treating infections is tremendously flawed and those flaws are rather glaring when it comes to treating stealth infections such as these. I am hoping the book will stimulate the development of a much different approach to treating infections, one that is a great deal more sophisticated than the one currently in use. The bacteria are evolving, we need to, too.
Q: Why should people with Lyme be concerned about coinfections and mycoplasma?
A: Coinfections make treating Lyme much more difficult due to the synergy between Lyme and other coinfectious agents. Research has found, time and time again, that coinfection is much more common than not. Those with coinfections tend to be sicker longer, have more difficult symptoms, possess a lower quality of life, and are much less likely to heal from the use of monotherapies such as antibiotics.
Q: Please give us a basic working definition of mycoplasma.
A: Perhaps the tiniest bacteria known, mycoplasma must scavenge almost all of its nutrients from its host by breaking down host cellular tissues. It has an affinity for mucus membrane systems and cilia and once in the body creates a kind of nutrient starvation in the host which results in a wide range of symptoms, much as lyme does.
Q: What is mycoplasma's relation to Lyme disease? How long have medical doctors been noticing its relationship to Lyme?
A: Mycoplasma, like most of the coinfections, is very new to medical doctors. Like most [coinfections], it has only come to prominence in the past 15 years or so, more so each year. As with the other coinfectious agents, it is spread by tickbite (among other things). As researchers have looked deeper into the Lyme epidemic, they have found that mycoplasma is a much more common coinfection than realized.
Q: Please elaborate on the issue of chronic Lyme -- the idea being that many of us go 'chronic' because we were not diagnosed early enough for treatment to be fully effective. How can a working knowledge of herbal remedies help?
A: About 60 percent of people who are infected with Lyme can be helped by antibiotics. Five to ten percent are not. Thirty to thirty-five percent appear to be helped initially but relapse. Added to that are the very large group of people who are never properly diagnosed with lyme. About half of those heal naturally over time, the others do not.
In consequence there is a large group of people that develop chronic Lyme. In that population, about half will respond to a fairly simple herbal protocol, the others will not. Herbs are much more elegant medicinal agents than pharmaceuticals in that they contain hundred to thousands of complex compounds that work together synergistically when confronted by disease organisms.
The plants have been here much longer than people and they have developed extremely sophisticated responses to infections. when we take them internally, those responses are medicines for us. The very nature of stealth pathogens and their wide impacts on the body make herbs a very useful approach.
In essence, successful treatment of Lyme infections needs to address: immune status, inflammation dynamics that are breaking down cellular tissues in the body (cytokine cascades), specific symptoms, and the long term damage, especially in the nervous system, that lyme causes. Pharmaceuticals are useless for most of those. Each of those problems can often be addressed with one or two plants due to the complexity of compounds in the plants.
Q: Please say a few words about the difference(s) between plain old resveratrol capsules and Japanese knotweed, and why you prefer whichever you prefer.
A: I always wanted to use Japanese knotweed root itself for treating Lyme, however, when I first wrote the book there were no decent suppliers for the herb in the U.S. It turned out that a number of resveratrols were made using knotweed root, in fact what they were were actually standardized knotweed root, so that is what I first suggested.
Now that the herb has proved so helpful to so many, a number of growers and harvesters have made it commonly available. I like the whole, powdered, root the best for several reasons. First it is much cheaper than the capsules. Second, I think that it is much easier to take these herbs if the powder is simply blended into liquid and then drunk. Taking all those capsules is a pain.
And, just my own preference . . . I like wild plants or those organically grown. They haven’t been mucked about with; there is much less standing between us and the plants.
Thank you, Stephen!