Is Lyme Disease Curable? Functional Medicine Can Help!

In this blog, we will look at Lyme Disease and answer the question ‘Is Lyme Disease curable?’ You will learn:

• What Lyme Disease is
• That Lyme Disease is a complex illness
• How Lyme Disease is usually curable and how Functional Medicine is well suited to address symptoms resulting from Lyme Disease

Do you know what Lyme Disease is and if it can be cured? Do you suffer from acute or chronic Lyme Disease and its symptoms? If you want to know more about this increasingly common disease and how to best optimize your health, then this blog is for you. Please read on for answers!  

** Please note: If you want the longer, more scientific version of this article, then please click here ** 

What is Lyme Disease (LD)?

Lyme Disease is a tick-borne illness. It is caused by the bacteria borrelia burgdorferi and is transmitted through tick bites. After the initial tick bite, a person may develop an early stage borrelia infection which is acute Lyme Disease. If not treated properly, or in some cases, despite treatment, it can worsen and develop into late stage borrelia infection or chronic Lyme Disease. 

Doctors call Lyme Disease the ‘Great Imitator’ because it has so many potential symptoms and can imitate many other diseases. It can often go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Even if properly diagnosed, treatment is not always effective. Because of these issues, some people suffer quite a lot from undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, untreated or improperly treated Lyme Disease. Their symptoms often present as something the doctors don’t think is Lyme Disease. 

We have written extensively about Lyme Disease in our blogs. Please start here with some definitions of Lyme and continue reading through our blog for tons of information on Lyme Disease. In our clinic, we are experts at diagnosing and treating Lyme.

Is Lyme Disease Curable?

The good news is that…. Lyme Disease is usually curable.

In our medical experience, Lyme Disease is curable. But it is a complicated disease. It is best to see a Lyme-literate doctor. Please see our blog here on this topic. We recommend that you catch it as early as possible. See a doctor as soon as you realize that you have been bitten by a tick, have a bull’s eye rash or suspect you may have been exposed to Lyme Disease after time in nature.

Lyme is curable, but complicated:

• 63% of people today infected with Borrelia develop chronic Lyme Disease (Davidsson, 2018).

• Many Lyme Disease patients either do not receive any antibiotic or antimicrobial herbal treatment or receive an insufficient amount of antibiotic or antimicrobial herbal treatment (Davidsson, 2018).

• No scientific studies support the claim that 3 weeks of oral antibiotics can always cure acute or chronic Lyme Disease (Davidsson, 2018). 

• Many scientific studies show that the Borrelia bacteria can survive 3 weeks of oral antibiotics in vitro and in vivo, in mice, dogs, horses, monkeys and in humans (Davidsson, 2018). 

• Alive Borrelia bacteria has been found in 7 out of 8 patients with chronic Lyme Disease (Davidsson, 2018)

• The immune system by itself can never eradicate a Borrelia infection (Davidsson, 2018). 

• Borrelia also has many different co-infections: Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia, etc. A tick can spread approx. 237 different types of bacteria and many types of viruses (Davidsson, 2018). Chronic Lyme patients might be simultaneously infected with many different types of microbes.

• Testing for Lyme Disease is often inaccurate. Not all doctors know to run the correct test and not all doctors know how to properly interpret the gold standard test, the Western Blot. 

• Unfortunately, as one research article puts it ‘A person who suspects a Lyme Disease infection is better off tossing a coin and diagnosing themselves because the blood tests for Lyme Disease today will miss most infections.’ (Davidsson, 2018). This is because the Borrelia bacteria has, as mentioned, the ability to change its antigens by changing its morphology.

• Studies estimate the sensitivity of the Lyme Disease test to be 44-46% (Davidsson, 2018). Sensitivity is a test’s ability to find a person with the disease as positive. A very sensitive test means that there are few false negative results and fewer cases of the disease are missed. At 44-46%, the Lyme testing is not very sensitive so we can expect false negative test results. A false negative test result says someone does not have Lyme Disease when they actually do have Lyme Disease. 

• Severe inflammation can result from the Borrelia bacteria, co-infections and how an individual person’s body responds. This dysregulated inflammatory response from the immune system can trigger autoimmunity or an autoimmune-like reaction, as a result of Lyme Disease. This happens in the case of Lyme arthritis for example and can be difficult to resolve.

• The Borrelia bacteria can hide behind biofilms. It can burrow deep into tissue and hide. It is then unreachable by any antimicrobials or antibiotics.

• Misdiagnosis can often happen with Lyme. Either the testing can provide a false negative or a doctor may not be Lyme-literate and therefore not recognize the symptoms for Lyme Disease, or may interpret the Western Blot test incorrectly.

• In petri dish studies, Lyme that was killed by antibiotics often regrows. Some herbs have shown in this kind of study to be less effective and some more effective compared with antibiotics. No antibiotic has shown in petri dish studies to stop regrowth. One herb called cryptolepis did show ability to kill Lyme and there was no regrowth at a sufficient quantity (Feng, 2020)

That is a lot of bad news about the challenges of treating Lyme. A Lyme-literate doctor is best positioned to address Lyme and its symptoms. Furthermore, by using a Functional Medicine approach, we can do a more effective job with addressing and resolving Lyme symptoms, even in the case of chronic Lyme. It is our true hope that some of the above research does inspire hope that Lyme can be eradicated without regrowing.