Slightly off-topic, but for anyone interested, I did write up my own battle with Lyme, which went on for many, many years, till I found a simple solution:
"How I recovered from Lyme Disease: I fasted for two weeks, no food, just water"
I've been going through something similar for the past 3 years. Finally a neurologist (most of my symptoms have been neurological in nature (brain fog, short memory issues, etc.)) for lyme, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. At some point I was bitten by a tick that was carrying RMSF. I was given 2 rounds of doxycycline which seemed to do absolutely nothing. At that point I made an appointment with a "lyme doctor" (yep I can already feel a bunch of you thinking "oh a quack doctor.") The doctor I met believes I have some other related infection (ticks don't just have to give you the gift of a single infectious disease.) Unfortunately there are no FDA approved tests for the infection she suspects I have (bartonella,) and the tests that are available are only 80% accurate and cost $1000 (not covered by insurance.) I opted to skip the test and proceed with a clinical diagnosis. I've been on 3 antibiotics (simultaneously) for the last 2 months and I feel so much better - not 100%, I'd say 85%. I'd have never believed this "quackery" myself if I hadn't spent thousands of dollars on nearly a dozen doctors, and a bunch of tests which yielded nothing.
Ticks are serious business. Be careful out there. The irony is, I'm a software developer that works from home and I rarely poke my head out of the house, save to mow the lawn. How I got bitten by a tick is still a mystery.
I did try fasting for 3 weeks (yep, just water and electrolytes) last fall (before we figured out the root cause of my symptoms.) Unfortunately that didn't help. I will likely try another fast while on these antibiotics to see if it helps resolve my problem(s) permanently.
Are you currently still on the antibiotics? I'm curious what will happen after the treatment. Apparently the parent poster tried antibiotics multiple times as well, not that I want to give false hope...
Also, I am not a native English speaker, but I am not sure about why anyone would immediately think a "lyme doctor" would be a "quack doctor"? Wouldn't a medical doctor specialised in lyme disease (i.e. lyme doctor?) be the most qualified to diagnose & treat lyme disease?
Another question if I may: when/how were you diagnosed? How did you know? This has personal relevance because I recently spotted the signature symptom for stage 1 lyme disease (erythema migrans) and immediately started treatment with doxycycline... really hoping that stops it from progressing.
I am still on the antibiotics. While my doctor hasn't specifically told me how long I'll be on them, I suspect it'll be for at least another 4-6 months.
The traditional medical establishment in the United States doesn't believe in "chronic" tick-borne infections - hence why "lyme doctors" are treated like quacks.
I was diagnosed in May. As far as how did I know? Well, I was tested for almost everything else under the sun: (before a 2nd neurologist ordered the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever blood test) multiple-sclerosis (nerve conduction study, skin biopsy), rare cancers (carcinoid), mast-cell activation syndrome (on top of my neurological symptoms I also have facial flushing which is totally random and seems to have no obvious trigger(s))
It's been a long journey so far and I have no illusion that I'm cured/symptom free, but the minocycline, rifampin & azithromycin have helped immensely. My short term memory still sucks (it was never great to begin with), but not nearly as bad. My brain fog has lifted, which was my biggest concern. Between my brain fog and memory issues, I was incredibly grumpy - I've actually started to enjoy life again for the first time in 3 years since this started.
>Unfortunately there are no FDA approved tests for the infection she suspects I have (bartonella,) and the tests that are available are only 80% accurate and cost $1000 (not covered by insurance.)
FWIW I tested positive for Bartonella via Igenix. IIRC this was treated with Rifampin (not fun) and Bactrim (fine). Unfortunately the side effects of being on these antibiotics long term are pretty real. When you kill all the good bacteria in your gut, the fungus grows wild, so make sure you're addressing that.
I was given 2 rounds of doxycycline which seemed to do absolutely nothing.
1. Doxy is not the worst antibiotic for targeting lyme that's got into the central nervous system, but from personal experience and the doctors that have treated me, it seems Minocycline is preferable. Note that it may seem like you're having a bad reaction to the medication, but this is probably just the Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction. I was told to gradually increase the daily dose to make it more bearable.
2. Once the infection gets to the chronic stages, a single type of antibiotic will at best suppress the infection, it will normally not get you anywhere near a cure. Different doctors will have different go-to combos, but should generally be flexible about it and try different combos if one isn't really working. Again, this should also be influenced by the affected organs based on symptoms. I'm glad you're now getting such a combo, many doctors who don't specialise in Lyme disease will not prescribe that kind of thing even if there's now a decent body of literature that this does work in many cases.
I've been on 3 antibiotics (simultaneously) for the last 2 months and I feel so much better - not 100%, I'd say 85%.
I've been there - be prepared for this potentially being a long slog, depending on severity and affected organs. After first developing symptoms in 2013, I finally got a diagnosis in early 2015. (Backed up by positive test results - Lyme ELISPOT/LTT, the ELISA test shows nothing, apparently it's only about 40% accurate) At that stage I was pretty bad, I have almost no memories from late 2014. The doctor that first diagnosed me got me to a stage where I was symptom-free whenever I was taking antibiotics, but after 2-12 weeks symptoms would return.
I ended up switching doctor in late 2016 as my overall progress seemed to have stagnated. She turned out to be a lot more test-happy than the original guy, and tested for a whole range of other stuff - bacteria, fungal, parasite, viral infections and various other values related to inflammation, nutrition etc. She found that in addition to Lyme disease (2 different strains of Borrelia), my immune system was also in overdrive fighting a bunch of other stuff, which I got treatment for. Plus she switched me to a different antibiotic regime specifically targeting one of my main symptom areas (bladder/prostate). 2 1/2 years later I'm not 100% cured. One of the 2 Borrelia strains I was infected with seems to be gone. The other one is still lingering - I've just relapsed into a mild Lyme episode for the first time after 6 months of not taking anything, so I'm on another 3-antibiotic treatment cycle. The gaps are getting longer, and the symptoms are becoming less severe. My immune system still occasionally goes wild on fighting VZV too (chicken pox virus, once you've had chicken pox it stays in the nervous system) which presumably somehow gets an opportunity to flare up thanks to the Lyme bacteria doing their thing or my immune system generally being in a rough shape after years of infection.
One thing that seems to have helped me is doing regular intense exercise; I've taken up tennis, but anything that gets you properly sweating should do. The recommendation was actually to do regular infrared treatment, but I hated that, and intense exercise seems to work similarly well. The perspiration supposedly helps to get rid of the toxins from the bacteria (live or dying, see Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction) and the spirochete bacteria themselves apparently cope badly with a raised host body temperature. (An early treatment for syphilis, another spirochete, was apparently the high fever produced by contracting malaria. I don't recommend infecting yourself with malaria.) I have no idea how effective it is at those 2 claimed benefits, but it certainly seems to clear the brain fog for 2 days or so.
FWIW, no dietary modifications seem to have made any difference for me; the first doctor made me try a bunch of these but the change after a few months was just that I felt hungry a lot.
I have a friend going through something extremely similar, and it looks like one of the toughest fights I've even seen. I think I'll shoot this over to her, maybe it'll give her some hope, as shes been pretty depressed now that shes in her 2nd year of treatment. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your recovery!
My email address is in my profile. In case she wants to get in touch, feel free to pass it on, I'm happy to answer any questions etc.
(This also goes for anyone else reading this who has or suspects they might have Lyme disease, or who has someone close in that position; I'm obviously not a doctor but will do my best to help.)
Wow, it's incredible to read that you've been sick for TWENTY years before finally getting cured by fasting for two weeks.
> I went 2 weeks without food. Just water with a little bit of salt. No food. I took antibiotics the first week but not the second. I felt very sick. The fast ended. I had a vegetarian meal. I fell asleep. I woke up the next day and had a large vegetarian meal. That night I felt funny. The feeling was similar to that moment, if you have a flu, when the fever breaks. With a flu, you get sicker and sicker till a moment the fever breaks and then you know that your immune system has kicked in. That was exactly the feeling that I had then. After 20 years, my immune system had finally kicked in.
On a related note, you might want to take a look at fast-mimicking diets (FMD), and one of his more credible proponents, Dr. Valter Longo. I've met him personally, and read some of the papers and material that he has published. It strongly relates with the last part of your article, in which you are trying to guess why fasting cured you.
Happy to hear it ended well for you. I can't imagine how life has been for those twenty years, on and off antibiotics, never able to understand what the real problem was.
In a related note - my wife had chronic vomiting for 5 years. Almost every meal would make her throw up. We went to general doctors and two gastroenterologists, who gave antacids that made the vomiting worse if anything.
One day I found an amateur website that said the issue was more likely not enough acid, gave ways to test it, and recommended drinking a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar.
My wife's vomiting stopped immediately after one dose. She recurred once or twice in the last 4 years but another dose of AC vinegar fixed it each time. Literally miraculous.
As someone who also suffered through very long-term antibiotic therapy:
Not to invalidate your story, but if your tests for Lyme were negative, it wasn't Lyme (borreliosis). B. burgdorferi is the only thing the medical community will always refer to as Lyme.
Azithromycin, doxycycline, and many antibiotics are almost harmless to coinfections of Lyme that are nonbacterial in nature, e.g. babesiosis, cytauxzoonosis and Powassan virus, to say nothing of the coinfections we don't even know about.
Two weeks without food is pretty extreme, and could have been fatal, but I'm happy it worked for you.
but if your tests for Lyme were negative, it wasn't Lyme (borreliosis).
Depends on the test. The ELISA test is cheap but extremely unreliable. ELISPOT/LTT seems to be the most reliable antibody test out there, at least for European strains. If the latter also came back negative, the evidence would indeed suggest this wasn't a Lyme infection but something else.
This may or may not be obvious, but the Lyme vaccine for dogs is not the same as the discontinued one for humans. So it's (unfortunately) not a simple case of rebranding/repackaging the vaccine they're already producing for human use.
I have no ide3a, there should be few, as it takes a special kind of intellectual failure to subscribe & promote such packs of falsehoods about both science and history, much based on a fraudulent study that caused the author to be stripped of his degree & Med license. [1][2]
Perhaps more importantly, it needs to be understood that anti-vaxxers are A) freeloading on the herd immunity created and maintained by the smarter people, and B) are directly endangering the set of people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons -- they are literally a death threat to many.
Much of this is also people falling for weaponized Russian dezinformatsiya, a very cheap way to both sow discontent, conflict, and illness in their adversaries [3].
You might think, but the Russians have been the world champions of espionage & subterfuge for at least a century. It is an enormous return on investment to deploy a few inexpensive resources and create havoc in your adversaries. Moreover, it is a win-even-if-you-lose situation; you don't need to get everyone to believe your dezinformatsiya (disinformation), you accomplish much even if people simply throw up their hands and say they don't know what to believe. The same with pushing extreme points of view in politics or hoaxes -- it pushes people to disconnect from their society, weakening that society.
Why? It would reason that they’d study this at a time when things were on an uptick. Im glad people are looking into these things. Looks like a combination of suburbanization and uncontained deer pop growth has contributed to the spread of the disease.
There’s a conspiracy theory that the us military is purposefully or accidentally responsible for Lyme as a bio weapon.
Fun fact, things like bubonic plague were used during WWII. Japan had a plan scheduled to go off a few months after they surrendered (and thus canceled) to use such things on one of the US west coast cities, can’t recall which.
Yup, operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. Japan planned an air-raid attack on San Diego at night to spread plague infected fleas. They never did that in the end because the war ended, but they killed some estimated 200K people in China while "testing & improving" those weapons - horror movie stuff... and AFAIK Japan never officially apologized for that (nor US apologized for giving immunity to Shirō Ishii, the mastermind behind Unit 731 war crimes, and his medical team)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_N...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii
> and AFAIK Japan never officially apologized for that
It would actually appear to be covered by a number of apologies they’ve issued over the years, first and most notably the formal apology for all actions in China which was accepted by the PRC as part of the Japan–China Joint Communiqué that formally reestablished diplomatic relations in 1972.
True, they gave a number of general apologies, but never on this particular matter. Unit 731 was completely pushed under the carpet, the people involved were given immunity by US in exchange for their knowledge on making bio-weapons. During the US occupation and later some ex-members of Unit 731 even continued to conduct medical experiments on unwilling human subjects, this time Japanese, which was really what triggered journalists to start digging into the story and that's how public learned about it. However, until 2002. Japan officially never even admitted conducting biological warfare, and no data on Unit 731 was ever released (officially Japan has no documentation about it at all). And Japan is not the only to blame here, US played the major role in covering up this story, just like in case of Klaus Barbie and many other nazi killers who they protected in exchange for information or specific skills.
IDK why corporate media loves to hate Japan. The two big criticisms are whales and war crimes apologies, yet other countries kill more whales (not just per capita but in absolute numbers) and it's not like America has ever apoligized for the Native American genocide(1), or even interning Japanese. 1-https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-californi...
Reagan apologized and also compensated descendants of Roosevelt’s internment policy[1]. I think people keep chiding Japan because they are reluctant to address the so called “comfort women”.
Obama signed an apology to First Nations Americans.
> 1]. I think people keep chiding Japan because they are reluctant to address the so called “comfort women”.
They’ve issued a bunch of specific apologies specifically regarding the “comfort women”, beginning in 1992 and then frequently thereafter. At various times they have apologized several times per year.
I stand corrected on internment camps, I didn't know they were compensated.
From the above source I linked:
>Neither the U.S. government nor the state of California has acknowledged that the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition of genocide set forth by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948
Finally, I don't see why Japan is singled out. The rape of Berlin could have been worse. Millions of Cambodian Viets were pick axed to death in the Killing Fields. Norway kills far more whales, especially on per capita basis. We still throw people in prison for smoking plants and are quiet about our police state. The Japanese were utterly bombed like almost no other time and place in humanity, and the only leadership from that era which survived did so by the US. And I don't see any people broadcasting their views about social justice for women going to Southeast Asia where Western money pours in to sexually exploit women. I think we live in an era with its own virtue politics, not an era of actual virtue.
> yet other countries kill more whales (not just per capita but in absolute numbers)
A country, not countries - only Norway kills (slightly) more whales than Japan.
Since the ban in 1985. Japan killed far more whales than any other country (twice the 2nd placed Norway), and as of 2012. (last available report by IWC) it was the 2nd by annual number of whales killed (less than 10% after Norway which currently is the biggest whale killer).
And when has Norway been at the center of public outrage? Japan has been consistently attacked for this in mainstream media. Killings matter as a per capita event, and Norway has them beat there, no contest.
IMHO both Norway and Japan fully deserve the public outrage for still slaughtering highly intelligent creatures to satisfy decadent consumerism and bizarre traditions. Unlike in some indigenous whaling communities, no one in Norway or Japan really needs whale meat to survive, it's just a fashion and vanity... and Japan has a bad reputation for long time, not just for whaling (and they killed more whales in total than any other country by far), but also as in 2nd part of 20th century they were the main market for selling poaching items and exotic hunting trophies. True, now China and Vietnam took over as their newly rich want their bloody status symbols, but if you ask why the bad picture, that's why, for a good reason.
Also why would hunting matter as a per capita event, as you say? Absolute number of killed animals tells how much stress we put on their population, it's important metric to spot the danger hunting represents. Per capita kills statistics make sense only in areas where native people depend on whale meat for survival so more people translates in higher need for hunting - which is not case for Japan, nor Norway, nor any of the major whalers' countries. They all use whale meat as vanity delicacy, not as basic food source.
I think you’re confused on how evidence and burden of proof works. These studies use genetic differences as a proxy for differences in periods of time. If there was a context that caused a high rate of genetic change, it would appear to be an organism with a lineage that spanned across a large time period.
"How I recovered from Lyme Disease: I fasted for two weeks, no food, just water"
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-...