Curing Lyme Disease
in Worcester County, Massachusetts
Summertime and the living is easy in Massachusetts — but not for local tick mothers. In July, the pregnant females are literally exploding egg bags, dying shortly after laying. Countless millions of their tiny, harmless young began emerging soon after from there leaf litter, seeking their first blood meals, mostly from white-footed mice.
Unfortunately, older, previously infected tick larvae from last year’s crop were desperately seeking blood, too, especially in June. June to a slightly lesser degree in July — injecting Lyme disease bacteria into human and nonhuman victims. At the peak of vacation season, hospitals consequently see the largest rash of Lyme disease patients.
In years of high heat and little precipitation, many humidity-dependent ticks die in the dry woods. With summer’s frequent rains appear to have created ideal conditions for their spread. However, with many little-appreciated researchers have been working behind the scenes to mitigate the damage of local tick-borne diseases, including the bird-banding team stationed at the Auburn Sportsman’s Club.
The sudden and rapid spread of the disease inland that began in the 1970s might be playing a role in the disease’s eruption in Central Mainess. Dr. Peter Rand and the Maine Medical Center in Portland. For years, Maine provided the identification and microscopic analysis of the bacteria from the ticks, pulled off many of the thousands of locally captured resident and migratory birds in Worcester County.
Despite mutual benefits, that pioneering relationship with Maine eventually ended. Budgets, staff limitations and Maine Lyme disease priorities frequently set aside our Worcester County specimens for long periods. Science vitally depends on money.
Serendipitously, help was found collaborating with this prior blog post without skipping a beat. http://www.solitarius.org/2018/08/02/putting-bullseye-lyme-disease/
World-renowned disease specialists Dr. Sam Telford, Dr. Richard Pollack and Dr. Andrew Spielman analyzed all the ticks are provided from local bird captures and wild mice, With their help, its determined which bird species carried ticks — they all traveled low through deer and mice habitat — and what percentage of them carried the infectious bacteria.
It was found significantly lower incidences inland than at the more humid coast. The grand scope of their other work on Ebola and other world-threatening diseases — and the fact that there was no money in Lyme disease research — again put tick samples on the shelves for frustratingly long periods. As a need to find another partner persisted.
Fortunately, researcher at Tufts University’s School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton. Dr. Stephen Rich analyzed all their tick specimens for several years until he left Tufts for another position. Allen Steere yet another expert!!! 🙂
Most recently, Yale School of Public Health Lyme disease research leader Dr. Maria Diuk-Wasser and her associates, Dr. Jory Brinkerhoff and Dr. Corrie Folsom, have partnered with The Diuk-Wasser lab that has been involved in cutting-edge DNA analysis of Lyme disease bacteria in birds, supporting the notion that there are several strains of the bacteria. http://danielcameronmd.com/lyme-disease-conversations-facebook/
That conclusion has many important human health implications. It could explain why people have different reactions to the bacteria. Different strains could have different virulences that might benefit from different modes of treatment.
At Yale, in a very time-consuming process, it takes two days just to extract the DNA. Each tick is placed in a vial of liquid nitrogen, frozen, smashed into workable particles. After appropriate chemicals are mixed in, the DNA is then filtered and separated.
But the DNA at this point in both tick DNA as well as Borellia bacteria DNA. To get just the bacterial DNA takes two more days of magnification or amplification of these small quantities, duplicating them as many as 30 times.
DNA finally needs to be run in a gel. Some 3-1/2 days are needed to get DNA from each batch, and hundreds of batches have to be analyzed. Teaming with Yale has revealed much about birds and Lyme disease in Worcester County. But to get enough tick specimens from birds required considerable assistance. We are at the forefront of understanding the role of birds in this dreadful disease in large part thanks to the dedicated local research volunteers assemble and train.
The voluminous data needed from Worcester County came from tens of thousands of work hours every spring and fall by Helen Blazis, Susan Finnegan, Tom and Stephanie Donaldson, Dr. Richard Weagle, Keith and Kim MacAdams, Jill and Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, Mattie Vandenboom, Brian and David Sheridan, Sarah Reich, Dr. Laurence Reich, Myrt Morin, Michael Contois, Ed Banks, John White, Dan Semenuk, Craig, Ken and Justin Dion, Lois Kolofsky, Dr. Stephen Vincent, Theresa Walcott and Nancy Best.
Alyssa Powers started getting sick in 2002 when she was eleven years old. She was tested for “pretty much everything,” she said, including fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, brain tumors and leukemia. When all the tests came back negative, doctors told her to call a psychiatrist. After two years of suffering symptoms, she finally found the culprit: Lyme disease. Her doctor wrote her a prescription for twenty-eight days of antibiotics and sent her on her way. ReadMore:
The Importance of Looking at Parasites, Viruses, Yeast and Fungal Infections
By Dr. Richard Horowitz
Welcome To The Lyme Disease News Homepage!
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/files/lyme_vaccine.pdf
Heather Bruntil and her family sought conventional treatment for Lyme disease when their household of four simultaneously came down with the tick-borne disease after a hike one early spring a few years ago. When that didn’t work, Bruntil said, “I battled with my insurance company to cover IV antibiotics.” Still, even after other extended antibiotic therapy, the family struggled to get better.
Bruntil turned to a book called Healing Lyme by master herbalist and psychotherapist Stephen Buhner. The book advocates using potent herbal & supplements, in particular andrographis, Japanese knotweed and Cat’s Claw used in the core protocol.
While Andrographis, or green chiretta (Andrographis paniculata), has been used for centuries in China and India and maybe also beneficial for Lyme symptoms because it is considered anti-spirochetal, and is believed to enhance immune function, protect heart muscle, act as an anti-inflammatory (for arthritic symptoms) and enhance and protect liver function. Cat’s Claw (Uncaria tomentosa, U. guianensis) is a woody vine commonly found in the Amazon rainforest.
It’s useful in treating Lyme symptoms such as arthritis and muscle pain, by enhancing the immune system. Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) is an invasive species in New York state. It’s believed to be useful in fighting off the spirochetes that cause Lyme, as well as providing anti-inflammatory properties by protecting the body from endotoxin damage and reducing Herxheimer reactions.
All three of these herbs, expert herbalists say, can be taken either alone or in combination with antibiotics to treat Lyme. After learning about Buhner’s protocol, Bruntil decided to get rid of all the pharmaceuticals her family had been using and follow his recommendations, even though Buhner himself suggests that the herbal protocol should be used alongside antibiotics to achieve an optimum outcome.
Best Supplements To Kill Lyme and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Lyme Disease May 2, 2018 by Michael Edwards
VIDEO: Healing Lyme with Stephen Harrod Buhner
https://www.tiredoflyme.com/the-buhner-protocol-for-lyme-disease.html http://wisewomanradio.com/interviews/buhner.html
https://lymetips.com/category/stephen-buhner/
Bruntil discovered that many of her symptoms, which she thought were caused by her Lyme disease, were also in part due to the antibiotics. She had to “repair all the damage done by them [antibiotics],” she said. The long-term antibiotics had resulted in painful side effects, particularly on her gut flora. Since transitioning away from antibiotics and focusing on herbal remedies and diet, Bruntil and her family have finally recovered.
She is now an herbalist & helps guide others suffering from Lyme in the New Paltz area.
While Bruntil did her own research to find the best remedies for her and her family after antibiotics failed, many naturopathic or homeopathic practitioners, such as Rhinebeck’s Dr. Tom Francescott, offer personal consultations for long-term Lyme sufferers.
New York State does not license naturopaths as medical professionals, however, fifteen other states do. Francescott earned his doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University, one of four medical schools in the country that specialize in evidence-based natural medicine. He treats patients suffering from a range of diseases, from Lyme to Crohn’s disease.
He offers treatments based on homeopathy, herbal medicine, craniosacral therapy and other alternative medicines. Naturopathic medicine also involves creating a personalized treatment for each individual patient, which Francescott believes is especially important with Lyme disease, since it affects each patient differently. “A tick could bite two different people,” he says, and each person would have “complete different reactions.” Francescott recommends pairing his therapies with antibiotic therapy, speculating that an integrated and comprehensive approach may be the most effective in fending off the infection especially if the Lyme is caught late.
One of the most popular advocates for alternative therapies for Lyme disease is Dr. Richard Horowitz, author of Why Can’t I Get Better? Solving the Mystery to Lyme and Chronic Disease, who also claims to have treated more than 12,000 Lyme patients.
One of the therapies that Horowitz uses in his practice involves a protocol developed by Dr. William Cowden, an internist and cardiologist specialized in integrative medicine. The “Cowden Protocol” uses various herbal extracts such as Samento, Banderol, Cumunda, Quina, parsley, and Burbur are believed to act as broad-spectrum remedies against Lyme, exerting antibacterial, antiviral, antiparasitic and antifungal effects, as Horowitz writes in his book.
NutraMedix, a company that sells the Cowden treatment, provided the herbs to Horowitz to administer in a six-month clinical trial with his patients, studying the efficacy of the herbs versus standard antibiotics.
According to Horowitz, the Cowden treatment improved acute and chronic Lyme symptoms in over 70 percent of the patients in whom he prescribed the full protocol. A follow-up study was conducted by researchers from the University of New Haven.
They tested the effectiveness of Samento and Banderol extracts against the most commonly used antibiotic in Lyme disease, doxycycline, on several different forms of Borrelia burgdorferi, including the spirochetes, round bodies, and biofilm-like colonies they form. (See John Carey’s story, Biofilms: The Culprit in Chronic Lyme). The results showed that the herbal extracts were effective in eliminating or dramatically reducing all three forms of the bacterium whereas the doxycycline had a significant impact only on the spirochetes.
I have found some answers in a book, The Widening Circle: A Lyme Disease Pioneer Tells Her Story. It was written by Polly Murray.
One of the greatest challenges the Lyme community has faced during the past several decades is defining, diagnosing and effectively treating chronic Lyme disease/PTLDS. PTLDS has been defined in the medical literature as “a syndrome in patients who have been treated for an erythema migrans rash (EM) with appropriate antibiotic treatment who have persistent or recurrent patient-reported symptoms of fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, and/or cognitive complaints with associated functional decline.”
Although it has been defined, the etiology of ongoing symptoms in PTLDS still remains controversial. “Theories of why patients remain ill generally range from autoimmune reactions post infection to tissue damage and/or persistent infection of the spirochete and/or its parts. No one model, however, has been sufficient to explain the ongoing symptomatology after standard courses of antibiotics”. With regards to chronic Lyme disease, the situation is more complex. There is no one accepted definition for chronic Lyme disease, nor a working model to properly diagnose & treat chronically ill patients. Healthcare providers and patients often lack a map to navigate the complexities of this disease, leading to long term suffering, rising health care costs, as well as increased morbidity and mortality.
Dr Phyllis Freeman recently published a data mining study in the journal Healthcare to help answer these important questions. As a member of the HHS Tickborne Disease Working Group, she grappled with these issues during the past year. Apart from the need to provide Congress and the American people with an up-to-date overview and report of disease vectors, surveillance, and prevention; pathogenesis, transmission and treatment; testing and diagnostics; vaccines and therapeutics as well as access to care services and support to patients, we felt it was important to define chronic Lyme disease.
This group represents the majority of those still suffering with “medically unexplained symptoms” apart from those suffering with PTLDS. I have treated over 13,000 chronically ill patients with tick-borne disease during the past 30 years and based on the needs of our working group and the Lyme community.
Dr Freeman decided to do a data mining study of 200 patients with chronic Lyme disease/PTLDS treated with dapsone combination therapy (DDS CT). This allowed us to evaluate the efficacy of these new “persister protocols” in chronic tick-borne illness (validating our prior published work on dapsone combination therapy) and evaluate the role of co-infections.
The results were published in part 1 of a Precision Medicine study. Detailed data mining also provided us the opportunity to examine the role of overlapping abnormalities on the MSIDS map causing inflammation, and how their downstream effects can potentially lead to chronic illness. The link below in the journal Healthcare represents the results of a six month data mining study on 657 volumes of charts in those with chronic Lyme disease/ PTLDS.
Among the conclusions of that study: “They suggest that patients now be considered to have “Lyme-MSIDS” and believe that this term best describes the multiple biologic and biochemical abnormalities that can be present after an infection with Borrelia burgdorferi (whose etiologies go beyond tick-borne disease), causing chronic illness. Each patient is unique, and each treatment approach must be individualized. . . The MSIDS model helps provide a framework for diagnosing and treating complex chronic Lyme disease patients that have a multiplicity of symptoms, along with a map of up to 16 potential factors that may need to be addressed.
These factors can keep a patient chronically ill, but these abnormalities are not regularly accounted for in routine standards of patient care. Establishing a uniform definition of chronic Lyme disease will facilitate diagnostic and treatment decisions and allow comparison among varied cohorts of patients”.
“The rising numbers of individuals suffering with Lyme disease and other long-term disabling illnesses (like CFS, FM, autoimmune disease and Alzheimer’s dementia) alerts us to a necessary shift in the paradigm for the diagnosis and treatment of chronic disease. An integrated, interdisciplinary systems-biology approach described in this study may help us to better understand Lyme and associated diseases.”
Precision medicine is the medicine of the future, and the MSIDS model is a proven precision medicine approach, tested over three decades. There has been too much suffering for too long. The approach described in this article (and in my two books, “Why Can’t I Get Better? and “How Can I Get Better?”, St Martin’s Press, 2013, 2017) which helps provide a map and answers for those patients and healthcare providers desperately looking for answers. My wife is now one and 1/2-years symptom free in remission since doing dapsone combination therapy and treating all of the abnormalities on the MSIDS map. I wish the same blessing of health for you and your loved ones. In service and in health, Dr. Richard Horowitz
Dr. Bill Rawls says he suffered with the disease for years to the point where he was forced to leave his practice. He tried all kinds of conventional solutions until he found something that worked for him. He sheds light on his success story in videos and his website in which he says:
Other Resources:
Andrew Spielman, an entomologist at Harvard whose studies of mosquitoes, ticks and other insects shed light on the diseases that parasites carry to humans, most notably malaria, the West Nile virus and Lyme disease, died on Wednesday, December 20, in Boston. He was 76. Based on research on Nantucket in the 1970s, Dr. Spielman’s observations of deer ticks proved valuable in understanding the transmission of Lyme disease, which was in the early stages of its diagnosis. He had been studying another potentially fatal parasitic illness, babesiosis, which deer ticks carry. https://www.lymeblog.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=797&fbclid=IwAR1zaT4dFgq-yWQ02pj6AHotxMAuFZ8f4qEjolfidhUM4AHqUMdEGNVzs4k
Dr. Sam Telford discusses tick-borne viruses, including the Powassan virus, in this article in The Martha’s Vineyard Times. This virus, as well as other tick-borne viruses are spreading (infection rates with Powassan are between 4 and 6% in ticks in NY), can enter in the body within 15 minutes of a tick bite (tick prevention!) and can lead to increased morbidity (neurological deficits) and mortality. I discuss viral infections in more detail on pages 155-158 of “How Can I Get Better?” Noted tick researcher Sam Telford said he sees no evidence that true Powassan exists on Martha’s Vineyard; with the pathogen’s close relative, deer tick virus, is extant on the Island.
Lyme Connection newsletter editor Janet Jemmott recently interviewed Dr. Brian Fallon, Director of Columbia University’s Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center. Fallon, along with Jennifer Sotsky, M.D., wrote Conquering Lyme Disease, Science Bridges the Great Divide. Packed with science and written for both medical and lay people, this book may help improve the dialogues we have with the practitioners who treat us for tick-borne disease.
The Story of Mike Grier.
I am not a story that will create big news, but I am a story saying being cured happened for me. It required my treating physician’s knowledge along with my countless hours of studying and learning as well to put an end to this disease. I contracted Lyme Disease in early 2013 archery hunting in West Texas. I all started off as many others do going from doctor to doctor with an autoimmune diagnosis of unknown origin and treatment with steroids that I never took because I felt there was more to it than that.
Dr. Sam Telford Talks Ticks – Part I
Dr. Sam Telford Talks Ticks – Part II
Thoughts on Lyme disease and ticks (commentary)
Mark Blazis: Tick population has been way down this season
https://www.therapies.com/lyme-disease.html
After years battling an “invisible illness” Rachel Channon has pinned her hopes on a controversial treatment at a clinic in Germany. The 34-year-old Corrimal woman will be one of hundreds of people from all over the world who have flocked to the St Georg Klinik to undergo hyperthermia as a last-ditch attempt to cure them of Lyme disease.
“Under Our Skin,” a critically acclaimed documentary and Oscar semi-finalist exposes the hidden story of Lyme disease, one of the most serious and controversial epidemics of our time. Slant Magazine calls it “head-spinning…riveting…a rigorously researched and highly thorough piece of investigative reporting.”
Each year, thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, often told their symptoms are all in their heads. “Under Our Skin” brings into focus a troubling picture of a health care system that is far too willing to put profits ahead of patients. The Chicago Daily Herald calls it “a ripping indictment of the medical establishment’s failure to uphold its oath.”
Lyme disease/Moringa research is paying off!!!
National Guideline Clearinghouse:
Summary of ILADS Treatment Guidelines for Lyme Disease
Best Lyme lab test for chronic lyme(10+years)?
#1. DNA Connexions
The Lyme panel tests for 4 different genes that are found in Borrelia burgdorferi, the most common cause of Lyme disease in the United States, and eight common Lyme disease c0-infectors including Babesia microti, Babesia divergens, Babesia duncani, Bartonella bacilliformis, Bartonella henselae, Bartonella quintanta, Borrelia miyamotoi, Borrelia recurrentis, Ehrlichia chaffensis and Anaplasma phagocytophilum. Testing of Lyme co-infectors (other tick-transmitted organisms) indicates likely infection with the Lyme spirochete as well. Can Ship Internationally. Click Here for More Details.
Kim Martindale
Lyme Disease; The Short History!
I’ve compiled these resources for myself and those who are looking for answers concerning Lyme Disease. Simply click on the text below to learn more.
~7~ SEVEN LYME FACTS THAT COULD HAVE SAVED ME!!!