In the current political climate, one is often reminded of Martin Luther King’s quote, a paraphrase of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The lesson is, though we may spiral through difficult times, we must remember that we are still moving forward, if slowly.
The same lesson is true for patients with Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses, especially those battling late-stage infections that take months or years to treat. Sometimes it can be hard to keep this long game in mind, particularly if you’re feeling worse today than you did yesterday, or worse, more sick this month than you did last month. It’s easy to feel stuck, or even to believe that you’re moving backward instead of forward.
In my worst days of suffering from Lyme and two of its co-infections babesia and Ehrlichia, I was without hope. Bedridden with migraines and insomnia, I wanted to pull my hair out. Some days I’d start to feel a little better, maybe gaining the ability to run an errand or type an email, and then I’d crash and spend the next three days in bed. I felt that I couldn’t take the suffering another second. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to go on living like that, either.
Thankfully, I survived because my health got so much better than I ever thought it possibly could. Someone recently asked me, “What got you through those dark times?”
I thought for a minute and said, “faith.” “Where,” she asked, “did you get your faith?” “Friends,” I quickly said. “They believed in the long game even when I did not. They kept the faith for me.”
Friends who had gone through their own adversity, medical or otherwise, trusted in the possibility of my recovery. They reminded me of the gains I had made. “You drove to the post office today! Last week you walked to the mailbox!” These accomplishments felt insignificant and silly then. I couldn’t see how I could ever move from such baby steps to working or exercising again, especially when I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow, let alone walk to the mailbox.
But within a year of treatment, including intravenous antibiotics, my brain fog lifted and I started tutoring students. My friends had been right. I wrote an article for a local magazine. I traveled to Florida. After another year of treatment, I felt well enough to move out on my own (I’d been with my parents) and started an editorial assistant job. I did physical therapy and was working towards skiing.
Then, I relapsed. Despondent, I thought I’d lost years of gains and that I would have to start all over again. I envisioned another two years in bed, if not more. But a friend pointed out, “Before this relapse, you had six months of good health. You haven’t lost that ground. You’re not back to ground zero.”
She was right. In reality, it only took a few months for me to restabilize. My arc had bent towards wellness before, and it did again, but this time more rapidly. Though the relapse felt devastating at the time, I can now see that it was really just a big hiccup in my long game of Lyme recovery. Since then I’ve been in remission, with smaller hiccups, for more than a decade. I’m able to teach, write, ski, paddleboard, and live a happy life within the context of chronic illness.
I now teach a creative writing course called “Writing to Heal.” On the first day of class, I draw a spiraling arc on the board. The line starts in the lower left corner and moves upward to the right. Then it circles back on itself. Then it moves upward and forward again, then circles back again until there’s an extended helix. It continues to spiral like a staircase until it reaches the top right hand corner of the board. When I finish, I tell my students to look closely at the long, looping arc.
“This is the healing process,” I say.
I’m grateful I held on through my spirals, because the long game has been more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. Hard as it’s been, it has always bent towards wellness, and I have faith that it will continue to do so.
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own.
Jennifer Crystal is a writer and educator in Boston. Her memoir about her medical journey is forthcoming. Contact her at lymewarriorjennifercrystal@gmail.com.
FRESNO, California (KSEE/KGPE) – At just 7 years old, Chloe McLemore started having trouble forming sentences.
“She started stuttering and also scratching her head to the point that she had a bald spot,” Kathleen McLemore, Chloe’s mom, said.
She quickly then began experiencing other difficulties.
“Really bad body pain, along with stiffness for me and then brain fog, lots of brain fog, anxiety, depression,” Chloe said.
Kathleen said she took Chloe to several doctors, but no answer would leave them satisfied.
“It was very frustrating,” Barry McLemore, Chloe’s father, said. “I’m a mechanic, I fix things with my hands and I’m able to do so much. And here I have my daughter who’s broken and I had no power or couldn’t fix her.”
It wasn’t until Chloe went to Amen Clinic in 2017 where she got an answer. She had Lyme Disease.
“Ten years of false information and finally getting a solid ‘this is what you have,’ it’s hard to explain the feelings. I had a lot of joy,” Chloe said.
(See full article and news story in link above)
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**Comment**
This same story plays out thousands upon thousands of times across the globe with patients struggling with bizarre symptoms and doctors misdiagnosing them. Often they even refuse to even test patients let alone treat them. Our own WI representative Melissa Sargent had this happen when she took her son into a doctor. Children are losing their childhoods due to doctors who have their heads in the sand.
The article refers you to the CDC website for more information. Bad form. The CDC is directly behind the mishandling of this complex disease(s) and are not be be trusted further than you can throw them. The CDC is a captured agency and rife with conflicts of interest: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/02/16/the-cdc-is-a-captured-agency/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/01/31/when-als-is-lyme-letter-to-tbi-working-group/ The racketeering scheme to downplay the severity of Lyme disease as identified in the RICO lawsuit should be addressed and documented by the TBD Working Group and not ignored as if this crime does not exist otherwise it will be business as usual at the Centers for Disease Control and we’ll have another thirty years of failure to properly diagnose, treat and control this life-altering infection.
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/09/07/20268/ (complete convoluted history about Lymerix found in this link) In 2012, when the CDC revised the official case number of new Lyme disease infections per year from 30,000 to over 300,000 new Lyme––overnight, those of us in the know understood that they were getting the public ready to accept this upcoming vaccine with open arms and a sense of relief. In other words, scare the public just enough to make them open to wanting this product without causing mass panic nationwide or worldwide. And without having to explain their denial to date.
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/07/01/pbs-lyme-vaccine/Did you know that the LYMERIX vaccine caused 640 emergency room visits, 34 life threatening reactions, 77 hospitalizations, 198 disabilities, and 6 deaths? In a vile cesspool of conflicts of interest are university patent holders, drug companies, and the FDA itself as another patent holder. It generated 40 million dollars before it was yanked. (2008, Drymon)
There is often difficulty differentiating between psychosomatic, somatopsychic, multisystem illness, and different degrees of medical uncertainty. Uncommon, complex, and multisystem diseases are commonly misdiagnosed. Two case histories are described, and relevant terms differentiating psychosomatic, somatopsychic, and multisystem illnesses are identified, reviewed, and discussed. Adequate differentiation requires an understanding of the mind/body connection, which includes knowledge of general medicine, psychiatry, and the systems linking the body and the brain. A psychiatric diagnosis cannot be given solely based upon the absence of physical, laboratory, or pathological findings. Medically unexplained symptoms, somatoform disorder, and compensation neurosis are outdated and/or inaccurate terms. The terms subjective, nonspecific, and vague can be used inaccurately. Conversion disorders, functional disorders, psychogenic illness, factitious disorder imposed upon another (Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy), somatic symptom disorder, psychogenic seizures, psychogenic pain, psychogenic fatigue, and delusional parasitosis can be over-diagnosed.Bodily distress disorder and bodily distress syndrome are scientifically unsupported and inaccurate. Many “all in your head” conditions may be related to the microbiome and the immune system. Better education concerning the interface between medicine and psychiatry and the associated diagnostic nomenclature as well as utilizing clinical judgment and thorough assessment, exercising humility, and maintaining our roots in traditional medicine will help to improve diagnostic accuracy and patient trust. View Full-Text
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**Comment**
Thank God for Dr. Bransfield – a doctor who continues to underscore the need to listen to patients.
Here’s a video of Dr. Shapiro, member of the Tick-borne Disease Working Group despite a loud protest by the Lyme/MSIDS community, in a 2014 videotaped interview where he describes the term“medically unexplained symptoms” and urges the medical community to develop ways to prevent “healthcare-seeking behaviors” by parents who believed their children may have Lyme disease. https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/06/11/dr-eugene-shapiro-medically-unexplained-symptoms/
Excerpt:
“…it’s very clear that simply telling parents that Lyme disease is not the cause of these nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue, various pain syndromes that is not sufficient and that we need a new paradigm to how to best manage such patients. Often it’s not the pediatric infectious disease specialists who doesn’t have an ongoing relationship with his patients who is likely the best but someone who can develop a trusting relationship with them. Very frequently these parents are seeking affirmation that these symptoms are real and in fact they are real it’s just that they’re not caused by Lyme disease…..”
The question of what causes eating disorders has puzzled the medical community since “wasting disease” was first described in the 17th century. Today, researchers and clinicians agree that, in addition to psychosocial and environmental risk factors, there is a strong biological basis to these disorders. Now, new data from a Massachusetts General Hospital researcher suggests that exposure to common childhood infections, such as strep throat or bronchitis, may significantly raise a person’s risk of developing anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and other eating disorders.
“Infections, by and large, have typical behaviors associated with them, and among those most commonly reported is loss of appetite.”
Results of the population-based study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that infections that required hospitalization or treatment with anti-infective medications, such as antibiotics, antifungals or antivirals, increased the risk of developing an eating disorder by as much as 39%. The multi-institutional study, which analyzed the health histories of more than 500,000 adolescent girls in Denmark, also found that recurrent infections and repeated treatment increased the risk.
Infections and Behavior
“Infections and inflammation more broadly have been recognized to play a role in psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia, but this has been less explored in eating disorders,” says Lauren Breithaupt, PhD, a clinical psychologist in the Mass General Eating Disorder Clinical and Research Program, and lead author of the study. “We’re hoping that a better understanding of the relationship between the immune system and disordered eating will help identify a mechanism behind the increased risk and biochemical changes we see happening.”
Lauren Breithaupt, PhD
As an observational study, the findings don’t point to a single cause or effect, but one possible explanation, according to Dr. Breithaupt, is that the infection or treatment of the infection disrupts the gut microbiome, which in turn alters the brain’s neurobiological reward system. Another possibility is the body’s own inflammatory response. Inflammatory proteins have been shown to cause changes in behavior, such as loss of appetite.
“Infections, by and large, have typical behaviors associated with them, and among those most commonly reported is loss of appetite,” Dr. Breithaupt says. “If you’re already at risk for an eating disorder, this period of no appetite could have a priming effect.” Although more research is needed, Dr. Breithaupt is encouraged the findings further enforce the biological nature of the disease.
Eating Disorder Stereotype
“Eating disorders have long been seen as social constructs — think of the stereotype of the wealthy white girl who isn’t eating because she wants to look a certain way,” says Dr. Breithaupt. “It’s taken a lot of evidence — more than most other mental illnesses — to blow that stereotype out of the water. We now know that the rates are similar across the world and across cultures. We’re even seeing that there may not be as big a gender discrepancy as we previously thought.”
Despite mounting biological evidence, there is still a great deal of confusion in the medical community about how to diagnose and treat eating disorders. Dr. Breithaupt is hopeful that the team’s findings can lead to increased awareness of the signs and symptoms and that more hospitals and treatment centers adopt a more scientific approach to treating these diseases.
The Role of Philanthropy
“The Eating Disorders Clinical and Research Program at Mass General offers gold standard evidence-based treatment for eating disorders, but we receive so many referrals per year that unfortunately we can’t treat every patient who seeks services,” she says. “That’s why philanthropy is so important to the growth of our program. The work that we do is often funded by individuals and families who have been touched by these diseases.”
The other key to advancing the understanding and treatment of eating disorders, Dr. Breithaupt says, is education.
“In order to identify biological markers, we need larger sample sizes and data sets, which requires individuals with the disorder to come forward and to participate in research,” she says. “By educating the public about the biology underlying eating disorders, we can break down barriers and overcome the stigma.”
To learn more about how you can support eating disorder programs and research at Mass General, please contact us.
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**Comment**
Great read and a fantastic reminder that eating disorders often have a biological basis.
In addition, Lyme can trigger a condition known as pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome (PANS) which in turn can also cause eating disorders. http://www.childrenslymenetwork.org/children-pans-pandas/ PANS, similarly to Lyme, still has not been accepted by mainstream medicine despite thousands upon thousands suffering from both.
Hypoglycemia can also be a player. And according to this article, insulin resistance “causes the body to have problems metabolizing carbohydrates into biological energy called ATP. This energy is essential in the production of feel good neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Thus without that energy the person may tend to feel depressed. The unabsorbed carbohydrates are converted to, first, glycogen and then into fat cells. Thus we find that depressed people may be overweight AND depressed. They are not depressed because of obesity, but because of insulin resistance!! (MedicalNewsToday 8 Oct 2009) See also Hemat.” http://www.hypoglycemia.asn.au/2011/eating-disorders-anorexia-and-bulimia/
The article has great advice if you suspect hypoglycemia is your issue:
“If you suspect that an eating disorder is related to insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic condition called hypoglycemia) then have this tested by a doctor. See How to test for hypoglycemia. If found to be positive, encourage your client to adopt the Hypoglycemic Diet.
For most people sticking to a regime of frequent snacks of high proteins (every 2 ½ hours), plus various vitamins and mineral – so as never to feel hungry – should supply sufficient energy from proteins to produce feel good neurotransmitters such as serotonin. This together with regular – but not excessive – exercises should prevent unabsorbed carbohydrates from being converted to fat cells! But keep in mind possible allergies and food sensitivities that may affect the digestive system.”
I knew a patient who was not over weight at all but due to severe hypoglycemia and hypothyroidism they developed eating disorders. When they adopted the hypoglycemic diet and began supplementing with natural thyroid hormone the eating disorders disappeared.
Please spread the word as many doctors will only continue to look at this as a psychiatric problem when there are often biological causes.
5 Effects of Stress on the Mind and Body + 10 Tips to Reduce Stress
by Holtorf Medical Group
5 Effects of Stress on the Mind and Body & 10 Tips to Reduce Stress
We all hear about stress these days and how bad it is for our health. Many people consider stress a part of modern life and learn to live with it, but stress is not normal and it can be overcome! You just need to learn how.
Originally Posted November 2016
Updated October 2019
Knowing the far-reaching effects of stress, not only on our psychological well-being, but also on our entire bodies, can help us remember to prioritize stress management and other self-care practices.
Stress, Cortisol, and Adrenals
You may have heard these terms used together, but are not sure how they are connected. Stress is any kind of outside factor that our body perceives as a threat to our safety or well-being. Many people think this only refers to emotional stress or trauma, but it also includes physiological stress on the body, such as infection, traumatic injury, or a poor diet. Stress can also include environmental factors like exposure to chemicals and other toxins.
Cortisol is one of the hormones that our body releases in response to stress. It is probably the one most commonly associated with stress, even though there are others involved.
While this can be a very useful and sometimes life-saving response to a threat, problems can begin to occur if stress becomes frequent or chronic. As the adrenal glands become over-worked, they eventually can’t keep up with the body’s demands for the various hormones they’re responsible for.
How Stress Affects the Body
Here are a few of the major ways the mind and body are affected by chronic stress.
Mood
The adrenal glands produce more than just cortisol. They also produce neurotransmitters such as adrenaline (epinephrine), norepinephrine, and dopamine. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that help regulate things like mood, performance, weight, pain perception, and sleep. Depending on the degree to which the adrenals have been affected, the neurotransmitters become unbalanced in various ways.
Let’s take dopamine, for example. If dopamine is too high, someone may experience anxiety, hyperactivity, or paranoia. If someone has low dopamine, it can lead to addiction, cravings, or depression.
Hormones
In addition to neurotransmitters and cortisol, the adrenals also produce small amounts of the sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone (and their precursors). Along with balancing out hormones based on a person’s gender, sex hormones also help keep the negative effects of too much cortisol in check, acting as an antioxidant. But once the adrenals become chronically over-worked, more and more of the precursor materials (used to make sex hormones) get diverted to make cortisol, resulting in a decrease in sex hormones.
This results in lowered libido and other symptoms related to hormonal imbalances, such as premenstrual syndrome in women or erectile dysfunction in men.
Blood Sugar Regulation
When cortisol is released, the hormone glucagon is signaled and insulin is suppressed. Glucagon controls glucose storage in the liver so that glucose can be released into the blood. Insulin is the hormone that regulates the amount of glucose being taken from the bloodstream into the cells.
During chronic stress, the cells start to become resistant to insulin, leaving blood glucose levels elevated. This is why insulin resistance is the precursor to type II diabetes.
A few symptoms of insulin resistance include inability to lose weight, high cholesterol and triglycerides, cognitive dysfunction, and elevated blood glucose or insulin levels.
The adrenal glands are part of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal-thyroid-axis (HPAT), sometimes just referred to as the HPA-axis. Here’s where the thyroid comes into play.
The adrenals are regulated by the hypothalamus and pituitary glands. When cortisol is released under stress, the hypothalamus and pituitary, which work in a feedback loop with cortisol, slow down their production of hormones. Unfortunately, this also slows down thyroid function since the hypothalamus and pituitary regulate thyroid hormones as well.
Stress can also negatively affect the enzyme that converts inactive thyroid hormone (T4) to active thyroid hormone (T3). There are a few other mechanisms involved in the stress/thyroid dysfunction connection as well. Hypothyroid symptoms such as cold extremities, dry skin, depression, and constipation often indicate sub-optimal adrenal function. Most likely, thyroid treatment will be less effective if the adrenals are not addressed as well.
Stress triggers inflammation. Our body knows that chronic inflammation is damaging, so it compensates by slowing down the immune system in order to keep the inflammation in check. The immune system is also directly suppressed during stress since it is one of those “unnecessary” functions when we’re in “fight or flight” mode. This also affects thyroid health since a suppressed immune system can activate viruses capable of attacking and damaging the thyroid.
As you can see, so many functions in the body are interconnected and related back to adrenal function and the stress response.
10 Tips to Reduce Stress and Improve Your Health
This is only a brief overview of the effects of stress on the body. Chronic stress has also been linked to cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. It is estimated that as much of 80% of the population has weakened adrenal function.
Since there are different stages of adrenal dysfunction that require different treatments, it is a good idea to seek out a knowledgeable health care provider who can test your adrenal function and related hormones. Since many doctors only recognize adrenal disorders such as Cushing’s and Addison’s disease, you may need to search someone out who takes a more in-depth look at adrenal function using functional tests such as a salivary cortisol test.
There are some things you can do to help reduce stress which include:
Take Control of Your Thoughts
Many people have tons of negative thoughts in their head on a daily basis, without even being aware of it. This creates a stressful state and anxiety that keeps fueling your hormonal imbalances. A technique known as “thought‐stopping” can help you halt negative, obsessive thoughts.
The first step is to literally call a halt to this train of thought (like saying the word “Stop!” out loud or to yourself). Next, choose a positive thought on which you’ll focus instead. This way you’re swapping a negative, stress‐inducing thought for a positive one. To increase emotional comfort, it’s imperative to practice reassuring and realistic self‐talk (saying something along the lines of, “I am feeling anxious / irritable now, but I have the power to calm myself down.”).
Apply Self-Soothing Techniques
There are many physiological changes that are triggered, when we are faced with a stressful situation. Our breathing quickens, adrenaline is secreted, and our heart begins to race. This is called the fight or flight response – a natural survival mechanism intended to help us escape danger. However, when the threat is imagined, the fight/flight response is unnecessary and damaging to your health. Many people with chronic stress remain blocked in this state of alert, without being able to snap out of it.
Luckily, there are techniques you can learn to reduce your response to stress, like deep breathing techniques, muscle relaxation exercises and meditation. Deep breathing can help with a rapid heart beat. The most commonly utilized strategy is breathing by contracting the diaphragm, a horizontal muscle in the chest located just above the stomach cavity.
Using muscle relaxation exercises you can induce a relaxed state and physical comfort, by tightening and releasing muscles, beginning with the largest muscle group. Meditation is also a powerful way to bring back a peaceful state to your body and clearing up your mind from erratic and negative thoughts.
Check Your Diet
What does stress have to do with eating? A whole lot! What we eat and drink largely impacts our emotional state. Stimulating foods and drinks like coffee, sodas, chocolate, and alcohol can cause anxiety, trigger panic attacks, and increase feelings of nervousness and irritability, as well as trembling and shaking. Deciding to go “cold turkey” by abruptly eliminating caffeine is not always recommended since it can lead to withdrawal symptoms. You might experience headaches, restlessness, and irritability. So it’s better to decrease caffeine consumption gradually by replacing it with tea for example.
Regular alcohol consumption can also generate a lot of biochemical imbalances in your body, like blood sugar dysregulation, liver problems and dehydration, which add to the stress burden your body needs to handle.
Get Moving
By choosing your appropriate exercise routine you can reduce stress, improve mood, enhance self-esteem, and increase energy levels. Be careful not to over exercise, which can actually contribute to your stress level.
It’s a known fact that during exercise, the body releases chemicals called endorphins and norepinephrine, which interact with receptors in the brain. These chemicals determine euphoric feelings, reduction in physical pain and the ability to deal with stress more efficiently.
Get More Sleep
Losing just a few hours of sleep increases feelings of stress, anger, sadness, and exhaustion. It’s a vicious cycle since because of stress you might not be able to fall and stay asleep, but lack of sleep is also generating stress.
So try to get a solid seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and don’t feel bad about also adding a nap in the afternoon on days when you’re feeling especially drained. Go to sleep before 10 – 11 PM and don’t use the computer or watch TV before it, since these can interfere with your melatonin production and make it harder to fall and stay asleep.
Listen to Music
By choosing a type of relaxing music which you prefer, you can help the body and mind dissipate stress. Research has shown that classical music may help you unwind and improve your mood. You can also experience therapeutic CDs of “binaural beats,” which are meant to calm the mind and body and where different frequencies call forth different moods.
Begin and End the Day Right
In the morning, in order to make intelligent use of your energy for the day, take some time to reflect, meditate, read or better yet take a nature walk, away from computer and TV. You could do the same in the evening, or just simply delight in the rare pleasure of doing nothing. These can ease the stress of too much computer or office time, counteract overstimulation and boost your mood.
Doing Something Fun
Doing something fun always gets postponed due to the avalanche of responsibilities we have during the day. But without a balance in your life, frustration and so stress might arise. It’s been found that creating artwork, crafts or making time for a hobby helps to relax, can be very stress-reducing and takes your focus away from your own thoughts and worries.
Get a Massage
Massage is a great way to loosen the muscles that are habitually affected by stress. Think about all the frowning and scrunching of your face muscles and how relaxing it is to work on these! Essential oils can calm, center, and energize you by reducing the effects of stress and mental fatigue. You can give yourself a massage, while taking small breaks from your work, or you could have a professional massage to benefit your whole body.
Include Adaptogens
A class of herbs called adaptogens help your body to cope more effectively with the demands and stress of everyday life. They provide a sustained sense of calm, and while they increase energy, with the exception of Chinese ginseng, they are non-stimulating. Some of the most used adaptogens are: ashwagandha, rhodiola, holy basil, schisandra, shatavari, eleuthero.
Because of the great impact stress can have on overall health and well-being, it’s important to implement stress-reducing habits. Additionally, partnering with a knowledgeable physician to help address any underlying adrenal fatigue can prove very beneficial. Your mood, hormones, thyroid, blood sugar, and immune system (among other things) will be much healthier for it!
At Holtorf Medical Group, our physicians are trained to utilize cutting-edge testing innovative treatments to design a treatment protocol that is personalized to you. If you are experiencing symptoms of adrenal fatigue, give us a call at 877-508-1177 to see how we can help you!
References
1. NIH. “5 Things You Should Know About Stress.” National Institute of Mental Health.
2. Mayo Clinic Staff “Chronic stress puts your health at risk.” Mayo Clinic.
3. APA Staff. “Stress effects on the body.” American Psychological Association.
4. Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science. “The Physiology of stress: Cortisol and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.”https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dujs/2011/02/03/the-physiology-of-stress-cortisol-and-the-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis/
5. Harvard Health. “Understanding the stress response.” Harvard Health Publishing – Harvard Medical School.
6. Mayo Clinic Staff. “Stress symptoms: Effects on your body and behavior.” Mayo Clinic.
7. Josh Axe, DC, DMN, CNS. “7 Adaptogenic Herbs or Adaptogens that Help Reduce Stress.” Dr. Axe.
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**Comment**
This article is one of the best articles I’ve read on how stress affects the body and what you can do about it.
Lyme/MSIDS patients are in a war of epic proportions where nearly every single thing in their bodies is haywire. We need to do all within out power to reduce that stress.
The next step is precisely what this article recommends – partnering with an experienced practitioner who will help you uncover your specificimbalances. This looks differently on everyone but typically involves the thyroid and other hormone and mineral imbalances. I know of one patient who felt nearly well just by addressing the thyroid. People often don’t understand that the thyroid is the body’s thermostat and that if you have hypothyroidism (low amounts of thyroid hormone) your body’s temperature will be low allowing infections to proliferate. Address the thyroid and you’ve effectively made it tougher for pathogens to survive.
Taking appropriate supplements. Patients often complain about their Lyme literate doctor requiring them to take copious amounts of supplements. Unfortunately, they are usually right because of damage & imbalances caused by the infection(s). The goal; however, is to only take what is required.
Diet is key. This too is very individual, with some only improving by eliminating gluten, dairy, and all sugars. https://draxe.com/nutrition/elimination-diet/ This step often turns patients around entirely. Remember – food is medicine.
All the ideas in the article are very helpful and include listening to calming music.The first thing I do in the morning is turn on a relaxing music channel on Pandora. An example would be the George Winston channel. For more on binaural beats: https://www.binauralbeatsmeditation.com/the-science/
Binaural Beat demonstration. You need ear phones to listen.
If you prefer music:
Regarding essential oil diffusing: https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/diffusing-essential-oils/ After I turn Pandora on, I set up my essential oil diffuser with whatever blend I’m in the mood for. For a relaxing bedtime blend called “Counting Sheep”: 9 drops lavender, 4 chamomile, 2 frankincense, 2 bergamot. This would be for a large room. Divide in half for a small bedroom. For a grounding smell try “Peace & Harmony”: 4 drops patchouli, 4 vanilla, 3 orange.
Doing something fun seems frivolous to many patients but is so important. Unfortunately with Lyme/MSIDS, we tend to revolve around our illness. Doing something to break away from this is so important for our mental health. Whether you enroll in an art class or just buy Play dough to mess around with at home – do it. I’ve found plants relax me. My house has turned into a literal green house through the years. I love dirt! Another thing you could simply incorporate into your habits is coloring: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-mentality/201803/are-adult-coloring-books-actually-helpful
Word of warning: It is often the case that when initially starting Lyme/MSIDS treatment patients are extremely sensitive to everything including light, sound, and smells. It’s always important you listen to YOUR body and although the suggestions in this article are good, they may not be good for you at the moment. If you are sensitive it’s a sure sign your body is seriously fighting a war and you need to assist it in anyway you can and often that means sunglasses even in the daytime, and eliminating ALL smells and sounds. The goal is to move past and heal from sensitivities so you can enjoy the suggestions listed here.
Final note and the best advice I was given: “Don’t be depressed about feeling depressed.” I heard this from someone I contacted online who reached the other side of health who was willing to advise me in my desperation upon starting treatment and feeling so incredibly lousy. This advice helped me more than many things as there are some seriously dark days in treatment where you think dying would just be easier. Treating for this monster is unlike anything you’ve ever done before and will require serious dedication on your part. I encourage you to find a local support group for support and ideas on your journey.
Some of the best help through the years for me has come directly from patients.
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 