October 07, 2013

Lyme Disease, Part 3

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

In the third article of this series, we will look at the common presentations of Lyme disease.

Unfortunately, Lyme disease is a very difficult to diagnose using conventional tests. There is great variation in the presentation of the disease. Your particular symptoms will vary greatly depending on where you have contracted it (joints, muscles, nervous tissue, etc.) and whether or not you have coexisting infections, which most do.

Dr. Klinghardt, well known for his successful treatment of neurological illness and chronic pain with Integrative Medicine, says, “underneath that (Lyme infection), there’s often an infection with Mycoplasma. We still don’t know if it’s really transferred with the same bite or if people had it all along and become symptomatic when the immune system is suppressed by the spirochetes.”

Besides co-infection, there are also “opportunistic infections.” The major effect of the initial infection is to suppress the immune system, which in turn causes the patient to be vulnerable to all sorts of other infections. This is exactly how HIV/AIDS produced its deadly results.

The most common things people contract early on in the course of Lyme are different forms of parasites, such as protozoa, giardia, trichamonas, malaria, and a new one called FL1953. FL1953 was discovered by Stephen Frye and is a protozoan organism that is causing severe fatigue and illness in chronically ill people. He finds it is almost always present in a patient with Lyme disease. Also found in these people are all sorts of macroscopic (visible) and microscopic (invisible in stool) worms.

Lyme disease can disseminate throughout the body remarkably rapidly. Being a spirochete, the bacteria can contract like a large muscle and propel itself forward in a spring-like action. It moves easier in tissue than in blood. It travels through blood vessel walls and through connective tissue. Animal studies show that in less than one week from infection, the bacteria can be lodged deeply into tendons, muscles, the heart and the brain. Sometimes the host cell wall collapses on the bacteria, cloaking it and helping it to evade detection by tests or the immune system.

The Lyme spirochete is called pleomorphic. This means it changes form from spirochete to cell wall deficient (CWD) form. In the CWD form, the organism can lack the membrane information necessary for the immune system and antibiotics to recognize and attack it. Without this fixed, constant, outer appearance, our bodies and antibiotics have no target to lock in on, making it an almost invisible invader.

The simplest and most common presentation is the orthopedic form of Lyme. Typically the symptoms are more superficial, affecting large joints of the body. This pain is directly over or in a particular joint or joints.

When the microbes and immune reactions occur in connective tissue, (ligaments, tendons, etc.) the infection presents as a vague, dispersed nondescript pain. It often ends up being labeled as fibromyalgia by most doctors.

The third type of presentation is gastroenterological. This is where you can have stomach problems, constipation, recurring stomach ulcers and/or indigestion. These symptoms can be related directly to inflammation of the liver or pancreas caused by the spirochete, or it can be due to the parasites acquired after contracting Lyme. Aggressive parasite treatment usually can resolve these problems.

A fourth presentation is the expression of Lyme in a wide variety of neurological illness. Dr. Klinghardt states, “We see a lot of cases with MS…ALS… and everything in between: the chronic fatigued patients, the patients with vague, undistinguishable neurologic symptoms, the feeling of buzzing in the head, buzzing on the skin, and crawling under the skin.”

Insomnia is one of the key symptoms in many cases of Lyme disease, along with neurological symptoms such as headache and a wide variety of pain syndromes.

The problem is that you cannot diagnose Lyme disease on symptoms alone, because they are so varied. Testing is required, and even that is not definitive one way or the other.

In the next, and probably final, article in this series, we will look at the tests and lab recommendations used in diagnosis of Lyme, and at some of the treatment options available.