Lies, Tricks and Traps: Knowing Lyme Disease’s Biological Tricks Can Help You Beat It
“If You Know The Enemy and Know Yourself, You Need Not Fear the Result of a Hundred Battles” Sun Tzu
By Terry Henry, MBA, CNC, CRM
I had no idea it was Lyme Disease making me feel dizzy & exhausted as I dragged myself around NYC – I needed to stop and clear my head a lot when doing simple things like going to work or food shopping. I was too tired to exercise, and got crankier as the months wore on.
Then the left side of my face went crooked like a flat tire (a common Lyme Disease symptom known as Bell's Palsy), and I knew something was terribly wrong.
A series of doctors said I had pneumonia, chronic strep throat or fatigue syndrome, gave me antibiotics and told me to get more rest. I felt confused until after many months, a kind physician in California finally diagnosed me with Lyme disease. At least now I knew what was making me so sick.
Lyme Disease was taking over my life, and antibiotics weren’t making me feel better. I was afraid if I didn’t do something soon I’d be too sick to go to work.
After researching medical books, clinical studies and health journals for several years, I learned how the bacteria is biologically sneaky and great at fooling our immune system – our primary line of defense against infections like Lyme.
Here’s why Lyme bacteria is such a tricky enemy:
1. Stealth:
Once inside our bodies, Lyme bacteria can elude immune system detection by changing its signature or “antigen”. 1 Like a fake ID, this stops our immune system from recognizing it as an intruder, attacking and destroying it.
It can also escape lab test detection: without an immune system indicator to measure - like antibodiesexpensive lab tests can come back repeatedly with “false negative” results despite your obvious symptoms – this is SO frustrating for Lyme patients.
Even worse, the infection can cause our immune system to attack healthy cells that come into contact with the rogue antigens. This can give rise to what experts call “autoimmune” diseases, 2 where the immune system can’t distinguish between healthy cells & foreign invaders, misleading the body to literally “attack” itself as our immune system death squads are deployed to hunt down and kill the perceived threat.
2. Armor-like defense:
Lyme bacteria often form “biofilm”- a slimy, self-protective, protein barrier or “shell” that lets bacteria thrive by hijacking calcium, magnesium or available nutrients from our cells to feed themselves. With key nutrients depleted, our body becomes too weak to fight the infection on its own and we get sicker.
Like a shield, biofilm also helps the bacteria resist our immune system’s attack cells, lab test detection, and antibiotics. This helps explain why many Lyme sufferers including me, didn’t have success relieving symptoms with just antibiotic therapy.
Antibiotics’ inability to “bust” through biofilm is one concern. Another is they’re designed to “indiscriminately kill all gut bacteria, thereby ridding your body of many really important immune helpers”, 3 namely beneficial gut flora that’s key to defeating infections like Lyme.
About “80%-85% of our immunity is in the gut wall”. 4
Scientists say our gut contains a delicate balance of both good and bad bacteria that must be maintained for our immune system to protect us.
Antibiotics have been shown to upset this balance. A recent MIT/Harvard study concluded a common side effect of taking antibiotics is ironically - their ability to lower immune function: “Drugs are producing changes that are actually counterproductive to the treatment effort. They reduce the bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics, and the drugs themselves reduce the functional benefit of the immune cells." 5
3. More complex than other illnesses:
Many think typical treatments for other types of bacteria (like strep throat) can eliminate Lyme. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Lyme can promote “co-infections” like Borrelia, Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia, secondary infections like Candida, and viruses like Epstein Barr. For the reasons mentioned above antibiotics have been shown to promote growth of these “bandwagon bacteria”, as well as re-activate latent infections our immune system previously put to rest.
If it gains a foothold, Lyme can engulf multiple organs & functions, spreading “downstream” to cause chaos throughout our circulatory, digestion & central nervous systems. Its “spirochete” corkscrew motion allows it to burrow itself into key organs & tissues, causing heart dysfunction, chest pain, or lodge in the joints causing inflammation, chronic pain, and swelling.
It’s no shock that Lyme is called “The Great Imitator”- symptoms can mimic those common to fibromyalgia, lupus, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, pneumonia, chronic fatigue syndrome, often leading to misdiagnoses.
It can also attack the nervous system causing neurologic damage leading to numbness, brain fog, memory loss, cognitive impairment, and for me - disfiguring Bell's Palsy that drooped the left side of my face like a flat tire.
A Winning Gameplan
Lyme can easily pile on to take advantage of an immune system that’s already crippled from life dramas like job loss, emotional stress, physical injury, poor weight management, or toxins in our environment like heavy metals, mold, pesticides in our food, and even consuming too much sugar or eating too many inflammatory foods.
It may also attack multiple body systems (digestion, neurological, endocrine, etc.), so your counterattack must be also be multifaceted.
That’s why overcoming Lyme can’t just focus on killing bugs & bacteria – we need to strengthen our “whole-body” - physically, emotionally mentally and spiritually.
My arsenal included natural detoxification & immune system support with nutrition, weight management, emotional counseling and consistent exercise to reduce stress. Meditation strengthened my spirit. Strengthening our soul is very important to achieve healing.
Looking back on my illness, I now know it was my shaky overall health and emotional state that set the stage for my Lyme downfall. It was the wake-up call I needed to make smarter lifestyle & “self-care” choices. In that sense having Lyme was a gift.
Sources
Borrelia burgdorferi Changes Its Surface Antigenic Expression in Response to Host Immune Responses, Infection andImmunity, Fang Ting Liang, Jun Yan, et al, Yale University School of Medicine, October 2004
Autoimmune Disease; Why is my Immune System Attacking Itself?, Hopkinsmedicine.org, Ana Maria Orbai, MD
Gut Microbiome May Be a Game-Changer, J. Mercola, MD, Mercola.com, June 11, 2018
Gut and Psychology Syndrome, N. Campbell-McBride, MD, Medinform Publishing, UK, November 2010
Antibiotic-Induced Changes to the Host Metabolic Environment Inhibit Drug Efficacy and Alter Immune Function, J. Collins, et al, Cell Host and Microbe, November 2017.