It’s an epidemic. I’m here to tell you, your family doctor is wrong, ALL ticks carry nasty microbes that have the potential to wreak havoc on your health if given the opportunity. If you’ve been bitten, it’s highly likely that you have been infected with Borellia bacteria that causes Lyme disease. After struggling with Lyme disease for many years and exhaustively employing my passion for reading scientific literature, I’ve come to the conclusion that tick-borne infections are about to demand mainstream attention, if they haven’t already. While Lyme disease is NOT a common cause of death, it will cause you to age faster and the symptoms will wreak havoc on the quality and enjoyment of your life.
I love everything about white-tailed deer; especially their management and ecology. As deer managers, we regularly assess the effects of parasite loads on animal health so I understand their negative impact on overall health and fitness. I never could have imagined that a bite from a tiny arthropod could so greatly affect the quality of my own health. It’s ironic that the animal I have developed a career around plays a significant life cycle and hosting role for microscopic but nasty stealth microbes that make me sick with ever-changing symptoms. I’m not alone. In fact, since you’re reading this article in a hunting/management magazine it’s highly likely that you are harboring microbial parasites that were introduced into your body by an insect bite. The truth is, we all respond to them differently. Some who are exposed to Lyme disease never get sick while others deal with it their entire lives. We also know that lightning can strike at any time!
My motivation for writing this article was simple, to educate and debunk. I’ve seen more specialists than I care to discuss and I’ve discussed Lyme disease with my family doctor until he exhausted his referral options to specialists who told me I didn’t even belong in their office because my symptoms were not consistent with their respective area of focus. My livelihood puts me in contact with so many who love to live outdoors and share a strikingly similar story about their frustrating battle with Lyme and Lyme-illiterate doctors.
I’ve spent a small fortune on Lyme specialists and synthetic antibiotics because my costly insurance plan does not cover it. I was spending nearly $12/day, out of pocket, on antibiotics. Knowing what I know now, I would have skipped that expensive treatment in lieu of a program designed to proactively improve my immune system to maintain a winning edge over my personal Lyme war. I would replace, through supplementation, the lost collagen that these microbes feed on in effort to minimize or eliminate the symptoms most commonly associated with my joints, brain, muscle, skin and eyes. At the same time, I would have gotten more active through regular exercise, learned how to manage stress and cleaned up my diet much earlier in life! I certainly wouldn’t take advice from anyone who is Lyme ILLITERATE simply because of the initials before and/or after their name. I wish I could turn back time. Maybe there’s still time for you!
Origin of Lyme Disease
Let’s debunk a huge myth right now: Lyme disease is not new. While it’s true that we only discovered and began researching Lyme disease in the mid 1970’s to early 1980’s, it has been infecting humans for a very long time. In 1993, an ancient human was found frozen and preserved in the Italian Alps. The mummy was 5,300 years old and you will never guess what was found preserved in his body: the genetic signature of Borrelia burgdorferi, the corkscrew shaped bacteria that cause Lyme disease after a tick injects it into your blood stream! The microbe was a strikingly similar version to the one that bores into my cartilage and joints causing constant discomfort and pain. It’s a fact that the stealth microbes that cause Lyme symptoms have been around for several thousand years. This disease is not new, we just don’t know much about it!
We once thought its beginning traced back to Lyme, Connecticut where in November 1975, 51 people became ill after being bitten by ticks. Medical scientists attempted to treat the illness with antibiotics that had proven effective on similar illnesses at the time. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the case for Lyme disease. Lyme is not black and white and it’s extremely difficult to treat. The findings of researcher Dr. Willy Burdorfer revealed why this illness was different. Dr. Burgdorfer identified a corkscrew-like bacteria, known as a spirochete, in the blood of infected patients. To honor his discovery, the corkscrew-like microbe was named Borellia burgdorferi, commonly referred to as simply Borellia. Unlike other known microbes, Borellia microbes exhibited a unique ability to trick the immune system by altering its genetic makeup. This tactic tricks the immune system that was designed to fight off such microbes, thus the common reference to Borellia being a “stealth microbe.” Further complicating matters, Borellia employ their corkscrew shape to drill into your cells and then alter their form by becoming round cysts: an antibiotic resistant, immune system-evading protective sheath. It’s like a Ninja with a tank!
In 2013 the CDC finally admitted that at least 300,000 people are infected with Lyme disease every year in the United States alone. This statistic made me chuckle considering just 9 years prior the CDC insisted that number was no greater than 20,000; one example of increased awareness and acceptance that Lyme disease is no joke! Older doctors, possessing antiquated training, would disagree. The truth is, many practicing doctors today were trained with old information regarding tick borne infection.
There’s a tremendous amount of information out there on Lyme disease. My relentless research reveals that much of it is bad information. Further complicating matters, most doctors don’t understand the disease so they opt to write it off by simply prescribing synthetic antibiotics, as the CDC protocol demands. In fact, if a tick bite sent you to your family practitioner and antibiotics were prescribed for 14-30 days, you still possess the spirochetes that caused the symptoms that sent you there in the first place. The nasty microbes may be on the defensive and in hiding mode; however, symptoms can resurface (albeit completely different) at any point in time. Stealth microbes will lay dormant waiting for your immune system to be compromised (stress, illness, another tick bite, poor diet, etc.) and a new battle in the war begins.
My Lyme War
My personal Lyme war is so extensive that I could write a book on it! I have just about checked off all of the common symptoms of Lyme, as reported in the medical journals. My joint pain never goes away and my hectic personal and professional life leaves me completely drained and exhausted at the end of the day. Occasionally, brain fog hits me and for three months I experienced night sweats that ceased only two months later, this time lasting only a month. As I type this article the joints of my fingers ache, my lower back hurts and I roll my head/neck every 10-15 minutes to keep from stiffening up. Tonight, I fought back by exercising at the gym for an hour, the best thing I’ve found to maintain an edge on my tug of war match with tick borne infection. If you’re anything like I was before Lyme, you don’t take a tiny tick all that serious. Think again!
My story and battle with the medical community over Lyme is very typical of hundreds of thousands of others. Unfortunately, most of them lack an avenue to be heard. I’m extremely fortunate to be able to work for hundreds of private landowners across the whitetail’s range. They are all successful and motivated people who have just as much to offer me as I do them. During one of my rants over my search for what the heck is wrong with me, one of my clients, a very bright individual with a PhD in Pharmaceutics, urged me to do whatever it takes to be PROPERLY considered for having Lyme and/or associated coinfections. It turns out, lab testing is unreliable at best but more on this later. I shrugged it off initially until my family doctor left me hanging which sent me on a mission to find the answers myself (more on this later). I wish I had listened to my client sooner because as it turns out, my symptoms were the result of multiple tick-introduced stealth microbes that entered my blood stream to bore into and feed on my collagen rich tissues, including my joints, brain, muscle, eyes and skin.
My family doctor (Lyme illiterate) has referred me to a host of specialists over the years, all of which told me tests/diagnoses were negative. My doctor has thrown his hands up and opted to close the file stamped PSORIATIC ARTHRITIS. What?! How is this possible, I asked, when the SECOND Rheumatologist (arthritis specialist) he referred to said “I will see him but since he does not exhibit any of the symptoms of psoriatic arthritis I can’t diagnose him with psoriatic arthritis”. The first Rheumatologist he sent to chuckled as I walked into his office then immediately said, “you DO NOT have arthritis…you are free to go.” I shook my head in disbelief as I came to the realization that my doctor, a man who I trusted to oversee my health and fitness, couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with me. Perhaps he knew but the system that signed his checks didn’t want to enter the potentially profit draining arena of battling a disease that is not text book perfect when it comes to treating it. Fault was a moot point, I was getting extremely concerned about my health and no one had answers. Even after presenting a file folder full of Lyme-related research (I like research), my family doctor argued that there is no such thing as chronic Lyme disease. Wrong! There’s a great chance that your Lyme illiterate family doctor feels the same way and he’s wrong too!
When I left his office that day I was less than 9 months from the biggest hunt of my life: a Dall’s sheep/mountain caribou backpack hunt in the Northwest Territories. That day, during the drive back to my office I made a commitment to myself and my family to intensively research and understand Lyme disease to disallow it from greatly affecting my quality of life and fitness level. Specifically, I was not going to allow the disease to keep me from climbing the McKenzie Mountain range in pursuit of the animal I’ve always wanted a chance to hunt. That hunt was two years ago and I’ll never forget my guide looking me in the eye after day one and saying “we are a lot further along than I had planned for the first day, let’s set up camp and eat.” On day two, while we glassed the band of sheep that included his massive ram, my guide informed me that since we are three hours from being within shooting range we will set up camp and go after them first thing in the morning. I glanced at my watch and calculated that we had 4 hours of daylight remaining and questioned “Why don’t we go after them now and kill one?” My guide laughed and said “after hiking all day, I’m honestly not used to hunters who want to keep going”. How did I go from frustrated with joint pain, brain fog, night sweats, headaches and back pain to hanging in there with a professional sheep guide who was in phenomenal sheep shape? I simply improved my immune system by eliminating the disruptors from my life, as defined by Dr. Rawls in his best-selling book, Unlocking Lyme.
After paying a Lyme literate doctor to partially educate me and confirm my suspicion of infection, I immediately cleaned up my diet (with the help of my wife) and addressed my chronic immune dysfunction. I began running and exercising regularly (thanks to my wife). I hiked with weights and my gear in my pack. I ran my first half marathon and several other organized running events. I tried to manage stress as best I could and I slowly improved my immune system, suppressing the spirochetes in my body.
Like most chronic Lyme sufferers, I do not remember the specific tick or bite that changed my life and the way I care for my body. I don’t recall any rashes after yanking ticks from my body. It’s a fact that as many as 2 in 3 infected with Lyme never get a bullseye rash. The fact is, I’ve had countless ticks feed on me from the piney woods of New Jersey to the Peace River in British Columbia. Since I do not recall acute Lyme-related illness at the time of the bite, I’m a classic case for late stage symptoms common in chronic Lyme disease. I’ll never forget the thousands of ticks that emerged from a cooling bear carcass during a photo session after a successful bow hunt in Manitoba. I make a living and I feed my passion for the outdoors. As a result, I became accustomed to peeling ticks off my flesh and I never got overly excited over rashes left after tick bites; until recent years.
Immune System/Lyme Tug of War
I was once told by an acquaintance that he was dying as a result of his Lyme disease. I was uneducated at the time but I recall thinking that I’ve never heard of Lyme disease as a cause of death in a human! As a biologist, it just didn’t make sense to me. Deer, rabbits, mice, birds and humans are hosts for ticks and the nasty stealth microbes that they inject into us. They rely on us to complete their life cycle. Ticks simply want a blood meal and the microbes that take up shop in the saliva of ticks want to hop on board and infect a new target (you). Once they settle in to target areas of your body, they reproduce then await another tick bite where they hitch a ride on a new tick in hopes of finding a new host to live on. If they kill us, they disrupt a good thing they have going on. That’s not job security and it certainly doesn’t sound like the highly adaptive and creative spirochetes Dr. Burgdorfer identified and studied.
Your immune system is like an NFL Super Bowl championship defense. It works together, as a team, with a well-established game plan for attacking and defending an offensive assault designed to find an area of weakness. Occasionally, an offensive scheme is able to work together and exploit a weakness. Likewise, an unbalanced and compromised immune system opens up the door for an attack. If your immune system is robust and you are bitten by a tick that transmits a stealth microbe such as Borellia, you may simply experience a rash and flu like symptoms followed up by what appears to be a full recovery. Likewise, a compromised immune system may allow chronic infection to set in. In the later scenario, stealth microbes can continually wreak havoc when conditions allow.
Lyme is NOT a Standalone Pathogen
I often hear people talking about Lyme disease as though it’s the only pathogen spread by ticks. We may very well have a handle on the disease if it were that simple! The fact is we don’t quite know how many species of tick-borne microbes are lurking in the various species of ticks that bite humans. This is one reason that testing for tick borne illnesses is virtually useless, a discussion most general practitioners lack accurate input on. While Borellia is the most common tick-borne microbe associated with Lyme, Mycoplasma, Bartonella, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Anaplasma, Rickettsia and Chlamydia are also common. Throw in the fact that we know each group of microbes has several species and an unlimited number of different strains and you begin to see why testing is a waste of time and money and more often than not provides false hope. We know Borellia is not alone, and further complicating the mess, we also know that there are many species of Borellia that cause Lyme-like syndrome. If the symptoms are present, treat for Lyme disease.
Antibiotics
Research has proven that although synthetic antibiotics may help you gain traction (and there is a time and place for them), the stealth microbes that cause Lyme disease are extremely resistant to antibiotics. If your doctor disagrees, ask him what science he’s been reading. The fact is, many doctors today are triple booked and they don’t have the time to stay on top of newly emerging science (on an extremely difficult microbe to study) while managing a very busy and demanding medical practice.
There is no scientific evidence that synthetic antibiotic therapy “cures” Lyme disease. The microbes that cause Lyme disease merely go into hiding and return to their normal parasitic lifestyles once antibiotic treatment stops. All the while, synthetic antibiotics make a mess of your beneficial gut flora. Additionally, antibiotic resistance is a given when an antibiotic is used long-term. Furthermore, when environmental conditions become hazardous for the survival of stealth microbes like Borellia, they have an amazing ability to surround themselves in protective cysts and become dormant until the coast is clear. As a result, some Lyme literate doctors (including one of mine) feel that antibiotics administered in high concentrations indefinitely or until symptoms cease is the way to go. I tried this method but abandoned it after a few months because I am not favorable to long-term synthetic antibiotics due to havoc they can wreak on the body. I do agree that the antibiotics jump started me; however, a few months after taking them my symptoms kicked back in. As a result, I’ve chosen more natural herbal medicinal protocols developed my Stephen Buhner and Dr. William Rawls. The likelihood of herbal toxicity is very low and the benefits are great.
Testing
There exist volumes of research on testing for Lyme and tick-borne infection. All of it reports that testing for Lyme disease is terribly poor. The reasons are too numerous to include in this article; however, be prepared to inform your doctor that false positives and false negatives are so common that testing is futile. You might add that it’s discouraging that most labs only test for one or two species of Borellia considering we know of at least a dozen Borellia species that cause Lyme! I’ve had two negative ELISA tests administered by two different family doctors only to find out three years later, after spending $980 of my own cash on a western blot test, that I’m dealing with at least three tick-borne infections, including Lyme disease. It will take several years, if I’m lucky, to repair the damage that has been done to my joints and nerve coatings (myelin). I wish I could have those 3 years back!
The most common test done in doctors’ offices across the country is the ELISA test and unless you are presently showing a rash (doesn’t always have to be a classic bulls-eye) or Bell’s Palsy (numbing of the face) it will likely show negative results. Many doctors are aware that false negatives are commonplace from ELISA tests and as a result they don’t give it often. My father in law came down with flu-like symptoms after pulling a tick off himself. His doctor shrugged off a skin rash because it lacked the bulls-eye. He was initially sent home without antibiotics or testing. These signs and symptoms were screaming Lyme disease. The research shows that Lyme rashes do not always possess the bulls-eye rash and in fact can be any shape at all! Only when he went back for a second visit because half of his face went numb (Bell’s Palsy) was a test administered with positive results. There’s no excuse for a doctor to fail his patient like that.
Reliable Lyme Information
Since Lyme and associated tick borne illness are terribly misunderstood and inaccurately reported on I initially became frustrated when my research uncovered contradicting information. It would be dishonest if I did not mention a few reliable resources that I leaned on during my recovery and again for this article. These resources guided me as I developed my own plan for managing and one day beating my chronic misery. I believe I’m well on my way since I took matters in my own hands and committed to my plan. Since Lyme disease and tick borne infection is so misunderstood and difficult to study, trustworthy material can be challenging to find. Ironically, many times the worst place to find it is in your doctor’s office! The two books that I’ve added to my library and have changed the way I think and treat my illness include Unlocking Lyme by Dr. William Rawls and Healing Lyme by Stephen Buhner. I have also found a massive amount of reliable data from the web site for the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, a nonprofit advocacy group that fights for acceptance of chronic Lyme disease. www.ilads.org. Be VERY careful about Lyme information found on social media and the internet in general.
Winning the Battle
There remains a lot to be learned about Lyme disease and tick borne infections. The truth is there is great research out there; however, scientists are just scratching the surface. When you add the unnecessary resistance from the medical and insurance industries the pace of advancement and treatment options slows to a snail’s pace. Those of us who deal with it don’t sit back and wait for Lyme illiterate family doctors, but instead opt to seek the best approach to good health. I hope this information is helpful to fellow hunters who may also be following the frustrating path of Lyme-illiterate medical doctors. I’ve also written this article to present recent information that you won’t likely hear from your family doctor.
Moving forward, I’m optimistic in what I’m finding on the topic of treating Lyme (and ALL infection/illnesses) with herbal supplements. Essentially, when your immune system is strong, many nasty microbes can lay dormant in your body without causing too much havoc. Allow your immune system to slip due to any of the disrupting factors as defined by Dr. Rawls, you are likely to experience problems. The good news is that it is possible to successfully treat and heal Lyme. Although I occasionally slip backwards I now know and understand the exact causes of my joint pain and brain fog. For me, it’s a failure to exercise, minimize stress and avoid processed foods. The fact is, there is a huge amount of reputable research to support nonpharmaceutical treatments (herbs) that is being swept under the carpet by the medical and insurance communities. I have found great pleasure in the fact that the wild game my family harvests each year is as good as it gets when cleaning up our diet. Processed foods and mass produced commodity beef that Americans consume in giant amounts are feeding the diseases we are all struggling with. I’m energized by the fact that the herbal protocol designed to manage Lyme disease will also positively impact fibromyalgia, cancer, diabetes, depression, anxiety and many more.