By Bill Rawls, MD
April 21, 2025
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease where the immune system attacks the protective covering (called myelin) around nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
Myelin acts like an insulator to keep nerves from touching each other and shorting out, much like the plastic coating on a copper wire.
This damage disrupts nerve signals, leading to symptoms such as fatigue, muscle weakness, numbness, vision problems, and coordination difficulties.
Undoubtedly, plenty of people who identify as having chronic Lyme disease struggle with these same symptoms. And demyelination of nerves has been documented for Lyme disease. Beyond that, many people with MS test positive for Borrelia, the Lyme bacteria. So what distinguishes MS from chronic Lyme?
The answer: arbitrary cut-offs.
So how do we differentiate?
There is no single test that is specific for MS. The diagnosis of MS is made using a combination of clinical evaluation, imaging, such as MRI, and laboratory tests of blood and spinal fluid.
If all of the findings are deemed significant enough by the clinician evaluating the patient, then the diagnosis of MS is made and the patient qualifies for treatment.
This means that a person could have all of the symptoms, and some or all of the findings, but not to the degree that would qualify for a diagnosis of MS.
That person might end up being diagnosed with some other neurological condition, fibromyalgia, or maybe wouldn’t get a diagnosis at all. Chronic Lyme disease is unlikely because it isn’t a diagnosis recognized by the conventional medical community.
No diagnosis, no treatment. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Getting to the root cause
There are numerous drugs for treatment of MS. They work by blocking inflammation or blocking the immune system’s assault on myelin. The benefits are marginal at best and they carry significant side effects.
What the drugs don’t do is address why the body is attacking myelin in the first place. Without getting to the root causes of the problem, patients typically don’t get well. They live in a compromised state of relying on medications to mask the symptoms of their illness.
When you start looking for underlying causes, you’ll find that MS is listed as multifactorial. In other words, it’s not one specific cause, but rather multiple variable causes. This is also true of other chronic illnesses, including chronic Lyme disease.
A review paper published in the 2023 edition of the journal, NeuroSci, cataloged some of the known risk factors for MS that may be causative. These risk factors can be grouped into five categories.
- Diets rich in processed foods and saturated fat, but low in vegetables and fruit
- Chronic mental stress with inadequate sleep
- Smoking or chronic exposure to other toxic substances
- Sedentary lifestyle
- Certain myelin-scavenging microbes, including (but not limited to) Chlamydia pneumoniae, Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Human Herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6), Mycoplasma pneumoniae and other mycoplasma species, and Borrelia burgdorferi
While the review didn’t go as far as defining how these factors might come together to cause MS, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out a possible scenario.
A plausible explanation for MS
Myelin is contained within specialized cells called oligodendrocytes, which wrap around the shaft of a nerve to insulate it. Each of these microbes are known to invade oligodendrocytes to scavenge myelin as a resource for replication. While this provides one possible link to MS, that’s not the end of the story.
Evidence shows that the microbes can go dormant inside an oligodendrocyte after they invade it. Intracellular dormancy is a common survival mechanism used by many host-dependent microbes. It has been documented for borrelia and all the Lyme coinfections. Dormancy allows microbes to survive when conditions aren’t favorable for growth — in other words, when the cells they’ve invaded are healthy.
When cells are weakened by chronic stress factors — poor diet, chronic exposure to toxic substances, unrelenting mental stress and poor sleep, being sedentary — dormant microbes are able to reactivate, consume the cell, and then emerge to infect adjacent cells.
The immune system reacts by attacking the oligodendrocytes where microbes are emerging, in the process compounding the damage.
This is also a plausible explanation for chronic Lyme disease. The question remains: Why do some people progress to more advanced symptoms that are ultimately defined as MS?
The answer may be genetics. A variety of genetic mutations are common among people diagnosed with MS. You can’t do anything about genetic mutations, of course, but you can do something about the root causes of the problem.
A natural solution for MS and chronic Lyme
One obvious part of the solution is minimizing stress factors that weaken cells. Not surprisingly, there are many documented cases of people who went into stable remission from MS after modifying their health habits.
Improved health habits alone, however, don’t completely address the microbe factor. Fortunately, there is one thing that does — and it’s not antibiotics or other drugs.
Certain medicinal herbs demonstrate antimicrobial and immunomodulating properties that offer the potential for an ideal solution to support recovery from MS. They are already used widely for chronic Lyme disease and supported by sound evidence.
Among numerous studies, a study from Johns Hopkins University showed that certain herbs — cryptolepis, Japanese knotweed, and Chinese skullcap — were more effective for killing Borrelia than antibiotics.
Unlike an antibiotic, however, which is a single chemical agent specific for only certain microbes, an herb contains hundreds of chemical substances that act as a chemical defense system against a wide range of microbes, including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and yeasts.
Never just one
This is important because it’s never just one microbe possibility. People identifying as having chronic Lyme disease typically test positive for co-infections. Chronic Lyme co-infections associated with demyelination include Chlamydia pneumoniae, Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Human Herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6), Mycoplasma pneumoniae and other mycoplasma species.
But these are just the ones that have been identified so far — there are probably many others.
Combining multiple herbs extends the range of coverage. This is possible because the potential for toxicity of the most commonly used herbs in Lyme protocols is inherently low.
Medicinal herbs and mushrooms that are commonly included in chronic Lyme protocols that could also be beneficial for MS recovery include:
- Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum)
- Cat’s claw (Uncaria tomentosa)
- Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis).
- Cryptolepis (Cryptolepis sanguinolenta)
- Andrographis (Andrographis paniculata)
- Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum)
- Cordyceps (Cordyceps sinensis)
- Berberine or berberine-containing herbs
- Red sage (Salvia miltiorrhiza)
- Rehmannia (Rehmannia glutinosa)
Very importantly, the complex chemistry of herbs and medicinal mushrooms also protects cells from a wide range of toxic threats, including free radicals, foreign toxic substances, and harmful radiation. This applies to all cells in the body, including cells that make up the nervous system.
Immunomodulators
The medicinal herbs and mushrooms listed are classified as immunomodulators, meaning they upregulate underactive parts of the immune system and downregulate overactive portions of the immune system. This is important for reducing inflammation and calming the autoimmune response.
A final advantage of antimicrobial herbs is specificity for pathogens. The antimicrobial properties of herbs and medicinal mushrooms are selective for pathogens, but do not disrupt normal flora in the gut and other areas of the body.
Low toxicity and low potential to disrupt the gut microbiome means that herbal therapy can be used for extended durations, months or even years, which is often what it takes for complete recovery.
What this all means is that therapy — with a targeted endpoint of wellness, not managed illness — can be started with or without having a formal diagnosis.
With over 30 years of medical experience, Dr. Bill Rawls specializes in the holistic treatment of chronic illnesses, particularly Lyme disease. His personal journey with Lyme disease inspired his mission to empower others with the knowledge and tools needed to regain their health naturally. Learn more about Dr. Rawls’ approach to treating chronic illness with herbal therapy at RawlsMD.com.
References
An X, Bao Q, Di S, et al. The interaction between the gut microbiota and herbal medicines. Biomed Pharmacother. 2019;118:109252.
Anderson C, Brissette CA. The Brilliance of Borrelia: Mechanisms of Host Immune Evasion by Lyme Disease-Causing Spirochetes. Pathogens. 2021;10(3):281.
Berer K, Mues M, Koutrolos M, et al. Commensal microbiota and myelin autoantigen cooperate to trigger autoimmune demyelination. Nature. 2011;479(7374):538-541.
Bjornevik K, Münz C, Cohen JI, Ascherio A. Epstein-Barr virus as a leading cause of multiple sclerosis: mechanisms and implications. Nat Rev Neurol. 2023;19(3):160-171.
Branton WG, Lu JQ, Surette MG, et al. Brain microbiota disruption within inflammatory demyelinating lesions in multiple sclerosis. Sci Rep. 2016;6:37344.
Eisenreich W, Rudel T, Heesemann J, Goebel W. Persistence of Intracellular Bacterial Pathogens-With a Focus on the Metabolic Perspective. Front Cell Infect Microbiol.
Feng J, Leone J, Schweig S, Zhang Y. Evaluation of Natural and Botanical Medicines for Activity Against Growing and Non-growing Forms of B. burgdorferi. Front Med (Lausanne). 2020;7:6.
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**Comment**
A few points:
- The Johns Hopkins study was in vitro, or the lab, which may not transfer over to the human body.
- Antibiotics of daptomycin, doxycycline, and cefuroxime were used as controls at a final concentration of 5 μg/ml. I’m not sure how this translates to oral dosages given patients, but according to Burrascano, dosages matter greatly. It could be that these dosages were not high enough.
- Doxy is a great front-line drug due to its action against many coinfections, but it is not the best and only drug to treat Lyme disease.
- Eva Sapi found that while the use of doxy reduced spirochetal structures ~90%, round body forms increased about twofold.What this means is these round forms will simply lie and wait until conditions are better to reemerge. She found that tinidazole was the only antibiotic that reduced viable organisms by ~90%. Recent research showed piperacillin effectively cured mice of Lyme at a dose 100 times smaller than doxycycline with virtually no impact on resident gut microbes.
So, for anyone paying attention, doxy has its limitations and all experienced Lyme literate doctors use multiple antibiotics in a combination therapy.
This, right here, is why mainstream medicine and research are worthless because this complex illness is treated as a one pathogen, one drug illness when typically more than one pathogen involved, and to complicate it further, the pathogens have multiple forms (pleomorphism) and strains that need to be addressed.
- Daptomycin is an antibiotic that has been utilized recently in combination therapies. In a study through Johns Hopkins, when combined with doxycycline and ceftriaxone, daptomycin effectively cleared Lyme disease infection in vitro as well as in mice. However, daptomycin is relatively expensive and only available intravenously. Notice it’s effectiveness is due to being used in a combo therapy. I would say this is true of ALL antibiotics and why single antibiotics were not successful in the Johns Hopkins study Rawls refers to.
- While cefuroxime has been found to have a minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) similar to doxycycline; out of three borrelia species tested, two were susceptible while the third (borrelia hermsii) was less susceptible. The three antibiotics with similar MBCs in vitro, i.e., cefuroxime, doxycycline, and amoxicillin, demonstrated comparable activities in preventing borreliosis in B. burgdorferi-challenged hamsters (50% curative doses = 28.6, 36.5 and 45.0 mg/kg, respectively). So cefuroxime is far from perfect either when used alone. Source
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 