Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Alternative Antibiotics For Lyme Disease

My Chronic Lyme Disease Journey

Lyme Disease Treatment – Johns Hopkins (4 of 5)

Likely, you have come to this page in hopes of sorting out some of the confusion surrounding Lyme disease.

There is so much controversy around this disease because most doctors dont understand it. Even many doctors who consider themselves Lyme experts or Lyme literate medical doctors do not completely comprehend its complexities.

But I have one qualification that most other physicians do not. My life and a busy medical career were disrupted midstream by Lyme disease, though obtaining that diagnosis was quite the journey through multiple diagnoses including fibromyalgia.

My late 40s were marked by debilitating fatigue, tremendous brain fog, aching all over, burning in my feet and tingling in my hands, skin rashes, joint pain, chest pain, heart palpitations, mood changes, and poor sleep. I know what its like to start and end every day feeling like you have a terrible flu. Over several years, I experienced virtually every known symptom of Lyme disease.

Ultimately, this caused me to stop practicing obstetrics. But because I didnt have a firm diagnosis at the time, declaring disability wasnt an option. As an alternative, I started a less demanding primary care practice that did not require nightcall. The practice provided me with the environment I needed to recover. I had control over my work hours and the intensity of the work.

Questions To Ask Your Doctor

  • I found a tick embedded in my skin, but I cant get it out. What should I do?
  • Ive been bitten by a tick. Do I need to be seen?
  • Do I need a blood test to confirm Lyme disease?
  • Which antibiotic is best for me?
  • How long will I have to take the antibiotic?
  • What tick or insect repellent should I use for me or my child?
  • How long will the symptoms last?
  • What should I do if I still dont feel well a long time after I was bitten?

What Are The Potential Complications Of Lyme Disease

Most cases of Lyme disease can be cured with antibiotics, especially if treatment is begun early in the course of illness. However, a small percentage of people with Lyme disease have symptoms that last for months to years after treatment with antibiotics.

Complications of Lyme disease range from joint pain and stiffness to meningitis and paralysis. About 10 to 20% of untreated or complicated cases of Lyme disease can progress to arthritis.

You can help minimize your risk of serious complications by following the treatment plan you and your healthcare professional design specifically for you. Complications of Lyme disease include:

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Treatment Of Lyme Disease

Early diagnosis and proper antibiotic treatment of Lyme disease is important and can help prevent late Lyme disease. The following treatment regimens reflect CDCs interpretation of the most current data for four important manifestations of Lyme disease. These regimens are consistent with guidanceexternal icon published by the by the Infectious Disease Society of America, American Academy of Neurology, and American College of Rheumatology.

Some patients report persistent symptoms of pain, fatigue, or difficulty thinking even after treatment for Lyme disease. The state of the science relating to persistent symptoms associated with Lyme disease is limited, emerging, and unsettled.

Additional researchexternal icon is needed to better understand how to treat, manage, and support people with persistent symptoms associated with Lyme disease. In light of these research gaps, recommendations for treatment of persistent symptoms in people previously treated for Lyme disease are not provided here.

If you are interested in information on chronic Lyme diseaseexternal icon, see NIHs website.

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Key Points To Remember

This antibiotic will ruin you.
  • Most Lyme disease tests are designed to detect antibodies made by the body in response to infection.
  • Antibodies can take several weeks to develop, so patients may test negative if infected only recently.
  • Antibodies normally persist in the blood for months or even years after the infection is gone therefore, the test cannot be used to determine cure.
  • Infection with other diseases, including some tickborne diseases, or some viral, bacterial, or autoimmune diseases, can result in false positive test results.
  • Some tests give results for two types of antibody, IgM and IgG. Positive IgM results should be disregarded if the patient has been ill for more than 30 days.

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Problems With Testing For Lyme Disease

The problem is that Lyme disease is critically misunderstood by many people in the medical profession. Most doctors are not very well-versed in Lyme disease. Testing is not reliable. Many medical professionals are simply not educated about chronic Lyme disease to recognize and treat it. Conventional doctors often have a difficult time diagnosing, understanding, or treating something that they cannot see or isolate. Hence, Lyme disease diagnosis and treatment may be one of the most controversial and difficult issues in medicine. There are a lot of grey areas, a lot of misunderstandings, and unreliable testing, so going to a Lyme-literate practitioner is critical.

How Can I Tell If Treatment Is Working

If joint lameness is the presenting sign, improvement may be noted after 3-5 days starting antibiotics. A dogs response to therapy can be assessed by repeating the QC6 test six months after treatment is complete. Dogs that start with a moderate to high QC6 value typically show a 50% reduction or more in the QC6 at six months, indicating that treatment has been successful. Dogs that have a lower initial QC6 value may not show such dramatic reductions in the QC6 at six months, although the value should still be lower than the starting point if treatment has been successful.

A persistently high QC6 suggests treatment may not have been complete or that the dog became reinfected after treatment was stopped.

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Dont Be Fooled By The Repeat Test

People with Lyme want to know if treatment is working especially if they are not feeling better. The truth is, there are no biologic markers or immune system tests that show if you have recovered or are recovering from Lyme and coinfections. Repeating elispot tests like those offered by Armin Labs, or western blot tests and immunoblot tests offered by IGenex do not have any scientific proof to show they can predict the end of treatment or where you are in your treatment.

Simply put, retesting is not scientifically valid.

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Treating Lyme Without Antiobiotics 18 Months Later

Doxycycline and Lyme Disease Treatment

Ive been treating Lyme without antibiotics for about 18 months. For some, that might sound like an eternity. For those who have been struggling with Lyme, you probably know thats really not a lot of time to be treating this horrific disease.

I still dont know all of the answers. But I do know, that a no-antibiotics approach to Lyme treatment has worked remarkably well for me.

After 18 months, I am probably about 80% better. Im pretty ecstatic about the progress Ive made. I feel blessed that Ive experienced this much healing. Early on, I hit Lyme really hard. I did absolutely everything my doctor suggested. It was a lot. It was expensive. But it paid off.

You can read more here

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What Does Current Guidance Say On This Issue

NICE guidance on Lyme disease states that those without focal symptoms should receive 100mg oral doxycycline twice a day or 200mg once per day for 21 days. The first alternative to this is oral amoxicillin, 1g three times per day for 21 days and the second alternative is oral azithromycin, 500mg daily for 17 days.

How Is Lyme Disease Treated

With early-stage Lyme disease, youâll take antibiotics for about 10 days to 3 weeks. The most common ones are amoxicillin, cefuroxime, and doxycycline. The antibiotics will almost always cure your infection. If they donât, you might get other antibiotics either by mouth or as a shot.

If you donât treat your Lyme infection, you might need oral antibiotics for symptoms like weakened face muscles and irregular heartbeat. You may need antibiotics if you have meningitis, inflammation in your brain and spinal cord, or more severe heart problems.

If your Lyme is late stage, the doctor might give you antibiotics either by mouth or as a shot. If it causes arthritis, youâll get arthritis treatment.

Thereâs no therapy for post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.

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What Did This Study Do

This network meta-analysis included 19 randomised controlled trials involving 2,532 people with erythema migrans due to Lyme disease. No trials were based in the UK most were from the United States or Europe.

Each trial compared two or three antibiotics. Doxycycline was the most frequently used antibiotic. A number of doses and treatment durations were represented. For example, treatment length for doxycycline ranged from 10 to 21 days. For the main analyses, doxycycline was used as the reference treatment.

Both direct and indirect data were extracted from the studies. This approach is helpful when there is a shortage of head to head research, but this, and the overall low quality of included studies means that results need to be treated with some caution.

Protocols For Iv Therapy

Stevia Whole Leaf Extract And Lyme Disease

You must work with a doctor who specializes in treating Lyme disease with IV antibiotic therapies. They are the doctors with the proper equipment and alternative treatments available in their office.

Lyme literate doctors will create a protocol of therapy individualized to ease your specific symptoms. The protocols will include both antibiotic and alternative regimens.

The antibiotic treatment will include antimicrobial substances that fight against infections, viruses, parasites, yeast, and fungi. They can go anywhere in the body to fight, even cells and cell membranes.

Therapy Silver given intravenously compliment IV antibiotic treatments. Silver has been used for centuries in treating ailments. Lyme disease has been shown to prevent bacteria from replicating. It can also bind to hard to flush out viruses. Once it locks on, the virus is easily eliminated.

Vitamins given through IV are a therapy finding great popularity with people with Lyme disease and anyone else who feels depleted or who is struggling with some ailment. Vitamin C Mega Dose is one example that helps your own bodys immune system gets boosted so that it can participate in the elimination of Lyme.

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What Treatment Approach Did Well Patients And High Responders Use

We asked patients what their treatment approach was and listed four options a) antibiotics, b) alternative treatments, c) both antibiotics and alternative treatments, and d) no treatment at all. High treatment response was most closely associated with the use of antibiotics compared to patients who were using alternative treatments alone or forgoing treatment altogether. Treatment with antibiotics for Lyme disease was far higher among well patients and high responders compared to non-responders .

As you can see in the chart below, many patients who were taking antibiotics were also taking herbal supplements, which can be antimicrobial . So it is possible that there was a synergistic effect between antibiotics and herbal supplements.

Chronic Lyme Disease Or Postlyme Disease Syndrome

Following an episode of Lyme disease that is treated appropriately, some persons have a variety of subjective complaints . Some of these patients have been classified as having chronic Lyme disease or postLyme disease syndrome, which are poorly defined entities. These patients appear to be a heterogeneous group. Although European patients rarely have been reported to have residual infection with B. burgdorferi , this has yet to be substantiated either in a large series of appropriately treated European patients or in a study of North American patients. Residual subjective symptoms that last weeks or months also may persist after other medical diseases . It has also been recognized that the prevalence of fatigue and/or arthralgias in the general population is > 10% .

In areas of endemicity, coinfection with B. microti or the Ehrlichia species that causes HGE may explain persistent symptoms for a small number of these patients . Randomized controlled studies of treatment of patients who remain unwell after standard courses of antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease are in progress. To date, there are no convincing published data showing that repeated or prolonged courses of oral or iv antimicrobial therapy are effective for such patients. The consensus of the IDSA expert-panel members is that there is insufficient evidence to regard chronic Lyme disease as a separate diagnostic entity.

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Lyme Disease Antibiotic Combination Examples

In my experience, I find the prescription antibiotic combinations below work 85 to 90 percent of the time. The herbal combination options help 85 to 90 percent of the time. I find all these combinations more successful than the Andrographis/Japanese knotweed/cats claw combinations that some like herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner and Bill Rawls, MD, recommend. The Buhner/Rawls combination helps about 60 to 65 percent of the time in my clinical observations. To reach the success rates I describe here, it is essential to follow the first ten steps of The Ross Lyme Support Protocol to support the immune system.

Key Points: Each combination

  • Combines antibiotics to treat all forms of the germ.
  • Combines antibiotics to treat Lyme living outside and inside of cells.
  • Combines antibiotics that work in different ways to attack the germ from different angles.
  • Treats all growth phases of Lyme at the same time – this means treatments include antimicrobials that address persisters in addition to the growth phase of the term.

Idsa Publishes New Lyme Disease Treatment Guidelines

Long Haul Lyme Disease Risk Found: Even in Early Treated Patients | Johns Hopkins Rheumatology

The following is a press release from the Infectious Disease Society of America. Analysis from LymeDisease.org will be forthcoming.

New evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of Lyme diseasehave been developed by a multidisciplinary panel led by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American College of Rheumatology. Representatives from an additional 12 medical specialties and patients also served on the panel.

The guidelines provide practical recommendations for clinicians treating patients with Lyme disease, including, but not limited to, primary care physicians, infectious diseases specialists, emergency physicians, internists, pediatricians, family physicians, neurologists, rheumatologists, cardiologists, and dermatologists.

These recommendations aim to serve as a meaningful resource for the safe, effective, evidence-based care of people with Lyme disease. They address clinical questions related to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of Lyme disease complications from neurologic, cardiac, and rheumatic symptoms disease expression commonly seen in Eurasia and complications from coinfection with other tick-borne pathogens.

The guidelines include 43 recommendations related to diagnostic testing, including testing scenarios detailed recommendations about Lyme carditis and a discussion of chronic Lyme disease.

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Treatment Approach To Chronic Lyme Disease

What is the approach for a patient who presents with persistent symptoms of Lyme disease ? First, the Lyme Western blot should be repeated, and coinfection testing should be performed by a laboratory that is proficient in tickborne disease analysis. At the same time, other medical problems that could cause persistent symptoms should be ruled out. Measurement of the CD57 natural killer cell level, which is an immunologic marker that can be used to monitor treatment in chronic Lyme disease, should be performed . If neurologic symptoms are severe, a single-photon emission CT SPECT brain scan should be obtained, to see how much inflammation is present in the brain. Neuropsychiatric evaluation may also be helpful .

On the basis of these results, coinfections should be treated first, if any are present, and then oral or parenteral antibiotics should be used to treat symptoms of persistent Lyme disease. Antibiotic therapy should be administered in a rotating and open-ended manner, in conjunction with probiotics, to minimize adverse effects . Monitoring of clinical symptoms, CD57 natural killer cell levels, and markers of inflammation should be performed in conjunction with treatment .

Precedents for prolonged antibiotic therapy.

Treatments For Chronic Lyme Disease

A bite from a bacteria-infected tick causes Lyme disease. If you get the disease, you might have lingering symptoms. Some people have ongoing pain and fatigue, says Afton Hassett, PsyD, principal investigator at the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at University of Michigan.

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From The Frying Pan To The Fire: Alternative Lyme Disease Treatments Thatll Make You Worse Off

Whether you were once diagnosed with Lyme Disease and continue to suffer its devastating effects in the form of post-treatment Lyme Disease syndrome or are suffering from so-called signs of chronic Lyme Disease without a previous diagnosis, the following treatments spell danger rather than healing .

1. Prolonged antibiotics for those who have symptoms of chronic Lyme Disease or post-treatment Lyme Disease syndrome have been found not to work while some who have taken this route may report improved symptoms, scientific studies have found that this is not the norm, time and time again. Whats more, prolonged courses of often intravenous antibiotics can lead to opportunistic bacterial infections as the antibiotics destroy your microbial flora, and can even be fatal.

2. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the one treatment that has been shown to be able to fight some strains of Borrelia burgdorferi . Despite that, its pricey, extremely time-consuming, and prone to causing ear and eye complications . No scientifically-supported human trials investigating whether hyperbaric oxygen therapy is effective in people suffering from Lyme Disease have taken place, either, making this something you do not want to experiment with. Similar therapies with hydrogen peroxide and ozone have no scientific backing at all, on the other hand.

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