What is Lyme Disease?

Lyme Disease is the great mimicker. It can look like literally dozens of other illnesses. Common long term Lyme Disease symptoms include pain of any type, chronic fatigue, hormonal imbalance, cognitive problems and so many more conditions.

At Medicine with Heart, we specialize in treating and resolving Lyme Disease. We have written extensively on Lyme Disease. You can read more here in our ‘Lyme & Mold Guide’ (https://medicinewithheart.com/lyme-mold-guide/) and here in our recently published book (https://medicinewithheart.com/use-your-mind-to-heal-your-mold-and-lyme//)

What is Lyme Disease?: Diagnosing Lyme Disease

Lyme Disease can be tricky to diagnose. Symptoms can look like other health problems. The ticks that spread it can pass other diseases at the same time.

A Lyme diagnosis is made based on symptoms. We look at the physical signs like the bulls-eye rash, although not everybody gets a rash after a tick bite. Other symptoms are assessed. Blood tests are taken. The Western blot test is the most accurate test to diagnose LD. But not all labs are standardized so it is possible to get a positive result from one lab and a negative result from another. We can expertly analyze a Western blot to get the correct diagnosis from it.

Lyme Disease is called ‘The Great Imitator’ because it mimics so many other health conditions. If you think you have been exposed to ticks and your symptoms and labs indicate Lyme, then it can sometimes be a good idea to treat presumptively. This can be true even if the diagnosis is not 100% indicative of Lyme.

What is Lyme Disease?: Treating Lyme Disease

Lyme can be difficult to treat. The CDC estimates that 10- 0% of patients who are properly treated for Lyme may remain symptomatic after treatment for a variable and unspecified length of time (Hout, 2018). Those of us that study Lyme Disease and are up to date with the current research often estimate that this number may be higher based upon what we see in our clinical practice.

Although Lyme Disease is rarely acutely life-threatening, delayed treatment can result in more severe disease. If you have chronic symptoms of unknown origin, we recommend getting tested with a Lyme Literate Clinic. Not all clinics know how to properly order and interpret the correct, most-up-to-date tests, so working with a clinic that does is essential. We are Lyme Literate at our clinic and work with people all around the world (medicinewithheart.com).

We often see chronic Lyme Disease being treated with triple antibiotic therapy. While this treatment is the right course of action for some individuals, for many this can cause Lyme to go temporarily dormant only to re-emerge and cause much more complicated symptoms later. If you are a clinician interested in learning how to properly treat Lyme Disease, we train on how to do this in our clinician training programs which can be viewed at: mindbodyfunctionalmedicine.com.

Lyme Disease that goes misdiagnosed or untreated is more problematic. It can develop into a debilitating syndrome.

In our clinic, we have expertise in treating a range of complicated, difficult-to-diagnose conditions like Lyme Disease. We look for the root causes in our patients to identify what could be causing the symptoms. We regularly treat and resolve Lyme, chronic infections and other complex conditions in patients in our Functional Medicine clinic.

What is Lyme Disease?: Complications of Lyme Disease

If not treated correctly and early on, Lyme symptoms can persist. Patients with different variations of late-stage Lyme Disease include (Radolf JD, 2021):

• People with untreated late-stage infection (late neuroborreliosis)
• Patients with subjective symptoms that persist after treatment. This is often called post-treatment Lyme Disease syndrome or PTLDS. In PTLDS, patients have non-specific symptoms such as fatigue and widespread musculoskeletal pain, after treatment for Lyme Disease with an accepted treatment regimen. The symptoms can present within 6 months or even many years later.  
• Patients with unexplained subjective complaints, often called Chronic Lyme disease or CLD. CLD can describe a range of atypical symptoms such as fatigue and chronic pain which occur due to a lengthy Burgdorferi infection.

CLD and PSLD share similar clinical symptoms of Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is not uncommon for patients with CLD/PSLD to receive a misdiagnosis of Fibromyalgia and/or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

In these chronic cases, it is unclear what physiological mechanisms (or multiple mechanisms) are responsible for Lyme Disease. The possibilities include: other untreated infections; a post-infectious state; permanent or temporary tissue damage; secondary conditions triggered by the initial infection; persisting infection despite bacterial eradication; immune dysfunction due to auto-antibodies, unregulated inflammation and/or a persistent B. burgdorferi infection (Radolf JD, 2021).

Trials have been conducted on the treatment of chronic Lyme Disease. Some clinical trials indicate that re-treatment improved some patients’ issues, such as fatigue and pain. Others have shown improvement in cognitive function. Antibiotic treatment is effective in about 90% of patients with Lyme arthritis (Hout, 2018)

Lastly, a great concern is when LD goes misdiagnosed or untreated. In these cases, LD can, years later, be diagnosed as chronic inflammatory age-related degeneration (for example arthritis, dementia or stroke). This is partially due to the increased complications of aging for those with persistent and untreated Lyme Disease (Radolf JD, 2021).  

Some neurological diseases can even be partially caused by Lyme Disease. We have written extensively about this and you can find the links to blogs here, including Lyme and Alzheimer’s, Lyme and Parkinson’s, Lyme and ALS and Lyme and MS.

** Please stay tuned for our next Blog!  **