View LaWill Treating My Gut Flora Put Lyme + Coinfections into Remission?
by Dr. Bill Rawls
Posted 10/29/21
Often, irritating gut symptoms seem to be part and parcel with Lyme disease. So then, can working on your gut health actually help you feel better? In this webinar short, Dr. Bill Rawls discusses how microbes throughout the body, including the gut, contribute to the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease and how balancing them may help you reach remission. Read Dr. Rawls’ personal story here.
Video Transcript
Question: Will treating my gut flora put Lyme and coinfections into remission?
Tim Yarborough: Our next question here is a really good one. This is from Kim: When I treat my gut flora for my Lyme, will it help or put my Lyme coinfections in remission? Will it help with any other symptoms such as vibration and ringing in my ears?
Dr. Rawls: It all goes together. It’s not one thing; everything is tied together, and it’s all about microbes trying to get at the cells of our body. So whether that’s microbes from the gut, or microbes coming in from tick bites, or microbes that we picked up as children, and if we’ve had them all our lives like Epstein-Barr, and CMV (cytomegalievirus), and Mycoplasma, they’re all affecting our cells. And so getting over Lyme disease is a process of healing cells and protecting cells. Weak cells, stressed cells, are more vulnerable to microbe invasion.
So for Lyme disease, you can imagine your whole body just being peppered with microbes — normal tissue, like normal muscle with normal cells and just cells that have been infected by microbes peppered throughout your tissues. Your immune system has to go in and take those things out individually, and they’re in your brain, and they’re in your heart, and they’re in your lungs.
And we all have a lot more microbes than just the Borrelia; we all have a spectrum of microbes. And then, you add the gut microbes on top of that, that are all invading your cells and basically peppered your body. So to get over that, part of it is healing the gut. We want to do that; we want to stop that flow, and we want to nourish our cells properly to keep them strong.
So herbs offer some big advantages in that you can take antimicrobial herbs for a long time, and they don’t disrupt gut flora. This is really important. And that’s the separating fact between herbs and antibiotics. Antibiotics are indiscriminate and kill everything. Herbs are discriminant. Plants have to take care of their normal flora and suppress the pathogens just like we do so that phytochemistry is very sophisticated.
So I took herbs, pretty high doses of antimicrobial herbs for about eight years, and I still take them regularly every day, not at the same doses, but pretty significant doses for a long time. And my gut just kept getting better every year, along with all of my other symptoms.
So when we’re treating the thing holistically, that we’re treating the gut, we’re using the herbs to not only help balance the gut, but we’re using the herbs to suppress the microbes in our system and also protect ourselves from free radicals and other damaging factors. So that the cells can heal themselves, then everything continues to get better as you move along. And that’s what it’s all about.
Dr. Rawls is a physician who overcame Lyme disease through natural herbal therapy. You can learn more about Lyme disease in Dr. Rawls’ new best selling book, Unlocking Lyme. You can also learn about Dr. Rawls’ personal journey in overcoming Lyme disease and fibromyalgia in his popular blog post, My Chronic Lyme Journey.
Medically reviewed and written by Izabella Wentz, PharmD, FASCP
Article Highlights:
Chronic infections are the Hashimoto’s triggers that get the least amount of attention, yet identifying and treating them can result in a complete remission.
The immune system remembers isolated protein sequences in a pathogen and then looks for similar looking proteins as targets. If the proteins on the thyroid match the proteins the immune system remembered, then the thyroid will be targeted for attack as well. It is a case of mistaken identity.
Gut infections such as Yersinia entercolitica, which can be acquired from pork, can trigger Hashimoto’s. Nineteen proteins in the pathogen look similar to proteins on the thyroid gland and treating it can result in complete remission. Treatments include doxycyline, berberine, oil of oregano and/or wormwood.
Most doctors don’t test for chronic infections, but functional medicine practitioners do.
Another trigger for Hashimoto’s is Lyme disease, which has 16 proteins that can cross-react with thyroid proteins. Lyme is progressive, leading to more and more symptoms and the longer you’ve had it the more damage it can do.
A Lyme patient writes the author and states many Hashimoto’s patients also have Lyme disease.
The author mentions Dr. Horowitz’sLyme quiz to see if you are at a high risk for Lyme, and recommends IGeneX or Ulta Lab Tests, as well as Ilads.org for more info on Lyme Literate Practitioners.
Dr. Izabella Wentz, PharmD with Brent Martin and Dana Walsh on Addressing Lyme
You can also download a free Thyroid Diet Guide, 10 Thyroid friendly recipes, and the Nutrient Depletions and Digestion chapter for free by going to www.thyroidpharmacist.com/gift. You will also receive occasional updates about new research, resources, giveaways and helpful information.
In their study, “Primary care clinical provider knowledge and experiences in the diagnosis and treatment of tick‑borne illness: a qualitative assessment from a Lyme disease endemic community,” Mattoon and colleagues examined frontline and primary care doctor’s knowledge and practices for identifying patients with tick-borne diseases.
They found that some physicians are frustrated with Lyme disease (LD) patients. “Providers described challenges and frustrations in counseling patients with strong preconceptions of LD diagnosis and treatment in the context of chronic infection,” the authors wrote.
The authors came to this conclusion after a series of focus groups with 14 clinicians from three primary care practices and a survey of 24 urgent and emergency care clinicians.
The diagnostic process contributed to some of the frustration.
“Clinicians had a self-professed lack of awareness of TBDs [tick-borne diseases] outside of Lyme disease, noting that they were unfamiliar with the signs, symptoms, and appropriate serologic testing needed to diagnose non-Lyme TBDs, as well as the prevalence of these TBDs in their local communities.”
More specifically, nearly 50% of clinicians reported feeling “not at all knowledgeable on anaplasmosis.”
Treatment approaches also led to frustration. Clinicians:
“appeared to have difficulty in identifying the appropriate treatment approach for patients with nonspecific symptoms and negative Lyme disease serology, with only 66.7% [of clinicians] providing the correct answer,” the authors wrote.
Problems presented by patients with chronic illness
Some doctors were frustrated when patients challenged their treatment plan. “This commonly came in the form of patients rejecting results of serologic testing, wanting a different length of antibiotic course than that prescribed, or seeking an alternative treatment modality.”
Some doctors were frustrated with the time and effort involved in taking care of these patients.
“Clinical encounters with these patients were described as time consuming and difficult.”
Finally, some doctors were frustrated by contradictory information by outside providers. “Two focus group discussions centered around differences in care plans between participants’ primary care offices and what they termed the ‘Lyme literate’ community.”
Need for more education and training
Clinicians felt additional training would be help avoid some of these problems. The authors cited an example:
“I ordered what I thought was sort of the standard Lyme titer. It came back negative and this kid continued to have a swollen knee…He went to the orthopedist. They couldn’t figure it out. He’s going up to the rheumatologist. And it’s just because I ordered the wrong test…I think [I] ordered the PCR, which was like, you know, the quick and easy one. But actually that wasn’t probably a good one to do.” [FG3, Pediatrics]
“The gaps in knowledge identified through the focus group and online survey data, coupled with the consistent necessity to provide point-of-care counseling and education to patients,” the authors concluded, “highlight a pressing need for resources and support for primary care and frontline providers treating patients for TBDs.”
Editor’s perspective
Neither the authors nor the participating clinicians questioned the accuracy of the diagnostic testing and treatment plans they administer.
Mattoon, S., Baumhart, C., Barsallo Cochez, A.C. et al. Primary care clinical provider knowledge and experiences in the diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne illness: a qualitative assessment from a Lyme disease endemic community. BMC Infect Dis 21, 894 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-021-06622-6
_____________________
**Comment**
A cringe-worthy article for sure. I couldn’t help but think that if doctors think they are frustrated, try being a severely sick patient, perhaps who’s spouse is just as ill, whose life is spiraling down a vortex of doom in every way possible and your doctor, the person who is supposed to have the answers, is completely and hopelessly in the dark.
Talk about frustration!
My advice: bypass these doctors at all costs and get straight to an educated, Lyme literate doctor with experience. It will save you time, money, and heartache in the end.
What will it take to develop new drugs for Lyme disease?
Dr. Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco internist and hematologist, is an internationally recognized leader in tick-borne disease diagnosis and treatment.
He is also a board member of LymeDisease.org.
Dr. Stricker recently delivered a recorded overview of tick-borne diseases to the European Society of Medicine Congress 2021. The title of his talk was “Lyme Disease: The New Pharma Frontier.”
As he notes in his introduction,
“Over the past year, there have been at least four novel antiviral drugs for Covid-19 that have been developed. It’s disappointing that we haven’t seen the same kind of drug development for Lyme disease over the years. [In this presentation], I’d like to focus on that type of drug development.”
Click below to view his talk.
___________________
To answer the question: we, the sick, must do it ourselves.
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/10/15/disulfiram-psychosis-update/ While not fun, I’m glad I used it and went through this so I can serve as a warning to others – particularly single patients. I would not recommend this drug unless you have family/friends around you. When you go nuts, you don’t know it. The psychosis is very real. Since disulfiram has such a long half-life, it stays in your body for a long time. The anti-psychotics to reverse the effects are riddled with side-effects. I spent $20K in the UW hospital with the most severe toxic reaction to disulfiram they have ever seen. “Mad as a hatter” doesn’t even describe it. I’ve spoken with local Lyme literate doctors whom have all had patients go South on it, so it wasn’t just me.
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 
