Lyme Disease is a complex, systemic disease which can develop quietly for months or years before you finally have a diagnosis. It affects nearly every bodily system and successfully evades both your immune system and antibiotics. So when you’re adopting a Lyme Disease treatment approach, you should be mindful of the complexity of Lyme – taking a long course of antibiotics simply doesn’t cut it.
Western medicine has successfully instilled a ‘pop-a-pill’ mentality in our heads. We are so used to being prescribed medication for anything and everything, and the problem with many medications is that they treat the symptoms, not the cause.
Got a headache? Stop your brain registering the pain signals with analgesics.
Got heartburn? Take a pill to neutralise stomach acid.
Got insomnia? Here, have some addictive tranquilisers.
Now, I’m not against allopathic medicine, far from it. It’s a life saving gift to the world. But I do think that we pop pills far too quickly without giving thought to what imbalance is actually causing the symptom.
The Pillars
With this in mind, approaching Lyme Disease treatment needs to incorporate more than just killing the bacteria, especially if you’ve had Lyme for more than a few months. You also need to reduce inflammation, rebuild & support what Lyme damaged, and detox.
Read on to find out how I healed from Lyme, and how you can too.
- Reduce Inflammation
- Rebuild & Support (coming 14th April)
- Detox (coming 15th April)
- Kill Bacteria (coming 16th April)
The First Pillar of Healing Lyme: Reduce Inflammation
When I first started treating Lyme, I jumped straight into hardcore, let’s kill some bacteria mode. And do you know what happened? I made myself worse for about 6 weeks. I didn’t have anyone to tell me to hold fire and approach my healing in a structured way – “shooting in the dark” doesn’t even begin to cut it.
Inflammation was running rampant in my body. All my bodily systems were overwhelmed. I was just generally not prepared for the additional inflammation that comes from herxing. Lyme had taken its toll on my body and the truth is that my body was simply not prepared for Lyme treatment.
So, how do you begin to prepare your body for Lyme treatment? The first step is to reduce inflammation. Imagine renovating a house. Now imagine that house still full of furniture & clutter. That’s going to make efficiently renovating nearly impossible! Reducing inflammation clears the space for renovations to begin.
Why is Reducing Inflammation so Important?
Inflammation is behind nearly every unpleasant Lyme Disease symptom. It’s behind the chronic pain which doctors can’t explain, the joint pain, the neurological symptoms, the gastrointestinal issues, the sensitivities, the sleep issues, you name it. If your doctor can’t explain why, you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s inflammation.
When inflammation runs rampant in your body, it quite simply makes you feel wretched. Additionally, the very process that you have to go through in order to heal (i.e. herxing) causes inflammation. It’s a raw deal. But I speak from experience when I say that reducing inflammation is the absolute key to improving your symptoms and reducing a herx.
Lyme Inflammation is Chronic
You can’t talk about inflammation without talking about cytokines. Cytokines are proteins that are secreted by the cells of your immune system (like your white blood cells which fight infections).
The sole purpose of cytokines is to tell other immune cells to do something. That something is to create varying forms of inflammation. The first cytokine triggers the next cell to produce a cytokine, which triggers the next cell to produce a cytokine, and so on. You end up with a snowball effect.
In a healthy body, inflammation is controlled, targeted and short lived. It’s a completely normal and vital part of your immune system. However, in Lyme Disease, the inflammation becomes chronic.
How Does Inflammation Become Chronic?
In an otherwise healthy body, a cytokine cascade is short lived and controlled. It generates the right amount of inflammation which allows your immune system to fight off the foreign invader. When you have a cold, the runny nose, sore throat and high temperature are due to a cytokine cascade, and those are the things that make your body inhospitable to the cold virus.
In this instance, it’s your own white blood cells that secrete the initial cytokines. They come across the foreign invader, recognise it as a threat, and start off the signalling process. When the threat has gone, the white blood cells stop producing cytokines and the cascade ends.
Inflammation becomes chronic when the initial upstream cytokines in the cascade aren’t switched off. They keep being produced, so the resulting downstream inflammation keeps growing and growing.
Why Aren't Upstream Cytokines Switched Off in Chronic Lyme?
There are two reasons why the upstream cytokines aren’t switched off in Lyme Disease. Firstly, the threat never goes. Borrelia is exceptionally good at evading your immune system, but in the process it leaves cell fragments and traces. These traces continually trigger your immune cells – they know something foreign is there but they can’t find it. So your own immune system is generating more and more cytokines.
The second, and most important, reason is that borrelia secretes cytokine of its own. As long as you have active infection, the borrelia is releasing cytokines. The borrelia relies on inflammation to break down your collagenous tissue – its food source. Reducing and interrupting that cytokine cascade has two benefits – it reduces your symptoms and it makes Lyme’s job harder!
Healing Lyme: How to Reduce Inflammation
Reducing inflammation requires a multi-pronged approach. But please don’t confuse multi-pronged with complex and expensive. Some protocols that I see are exhausting to just read through! Plus, I have serious doubts about whether they are actually possible to follow if you have, you know, a life and responsibilities.
I firmly believe in not hijacking your own body by trying to micromanage every little thing your body does naturally. It’s about offering a helping hand rather than hopping in the drivers seat. And some simple changes, additions and subtractions can go a long way to reducing inflammation.
Herbal Options
Herbal cytokine inhibitors were a game changer for me. The herbs actively inhibit or modulate those first cytokines in the cascade, which massively reduces the resultant inflammation. I recommend them to everyone, regardless of how you choose to treat Lyme. Check out my post on how to make it from Red Sage, Kudzu & Chinese Skullcap.
Epsom Salt baths are often overlooked as being too simple, but this is another method which shouldn’t be overlooked. Low levels of magnesium has been linked to chronic inflammation, but supplementing magnesium has been shown to lower the inflammatory blood marker CRP. This is massive. Magnesium is also absorbed much more efficiently through the skin as opposed to oral supplements, where it can end up irritating the bowel. So not only is an Epsom salt bath a potent pain reliever, it actively fights inflammation in the body.
Lifestyle Options
It may seem counterintuitive (and the last thing you feel like doing), but movement helps with chronic inflammation in a very important way. The human body is designed for movement, and when it doesn’t move it stagnates.
Lymphatic drainage suffers, oxygenated blood isn’t brought to muscles as effectively, and you will rarely end up taking deep, cleansing breaths which has many other benefits too.
Another important area to consider when reducing Lyme inflammation is your diet. Many people with Lyme have food sensitivities and intolerances – this is a direct result of inflammation. Your body is so overwhelmed and your immune system so frazzled that it interprets perfectly ordinary foods as a threat. It’s important to remove these foods from your diet. It’s not forever! I had to cut out gluten, dairy, sugar and animal products. But now I can enjoy whatever I like.
The Holistic Approach
If you follow me over on Instagram, you’ll know that I’m a huge advocate of the mind-body-spirit link in healing Lyme. And let me tell you, meditation is an incredibly useful tool to reduce inflammation. So many clinical studies have been carried out showing the direct impact meditation can have on inflammatory blood markers.
But wait! I often hear people exclaim that meditation just isn’t for them – sitting still for ages just isn’t something that works for them. And that’s okay. But did you know that passive meditation is only one type? If sitting still isn’t your thing, I highly recommend the Wim Hof breathing method. It will make you feel empowered, flooded with energy and like you can take on the world. And best of all, it involves precisely zero visualisation or sitting still.
The Four Pillars of Healing Lyme: Reduce Inflammation
So there you have it. The first part in a four part series summing up the most important lessons I’ve learned about healing Lyme. Simplicity is key. The overriding thing I want you to take away from this is that you don’t have to spend hundreds on supplements every month, you don’t have to meticulously manage every moment of your day to follow your protocol more complicated than rocket science, and you don’t have to drink celery juice every morning. I know that there are just so many voices shouting this, but I have suspicion that once they do recover, they will also realise that a lot of it is unnecessary, expensive trimming.
