How I Found Lyme Disease Natural Treatment after Years of Chronic Lyme Symptoms

My story of Lyme and Lyme recovery is like many Lyme stories, full of Lyme disease natural treatment approaches, conventional antibiotic therapy, and many ups and downs. But I hope for many out there suffering and looking for answers, it might provide inspiration to keep going. At the very least, it should certainly paint a realistic picture of chronic Lyme symptoms and provide some ideas about natural remedies for Lyme Disease remission and healing. 

You can also listen to Adrienne share her story on The getWellBe Podcast.

My Chronic Lyme Symptoms

I was diagnosed with Lyme disease at age 11, but only because of my younger brother’s diagnosis before me. He’d been sick with what were pretty clear chronic Lyme symptoms — joint pain in his knees and learning disabilities/cognitive issues — for years before any doctors figured out what was going on. When he was finally diagnosed, my parents looked at me, who had suffered from severe fatigue and short-term memory loss for at least a year (since age 10, but before that had not had those symptoms) and wondered if I might have Lyme as well. Sure enough, I did. 

Lyme disease testing is historically very inaccurate. In fact, only 50% of tests are actually accurate. That’s like flipping a coin! The accuracy varies widely based on when you were bitten, when you were tested, and the type of test used. The lab quality of where you send the tick for testing varies greatly, too. 

Unfortunately, I was too young to know what kind of Lyme test confirmed I had it or how long I had had Lyme before it was confirmed with a test. My mom has since passed away so I can’t ask her, and my father doesn’t remember — but either way, with some kind of test, a conventional doctor confirmed I had Lyme. The next step in the conventional system is always antibiotics, which I took for (I believe) several months, which was somewhat standard back then. After we finished the antibiotics, my brother and I both still had chronic Lyme symptoms. 

At that point there were no other real alternatives offered by the conventional doctors besides more antibiotics. My mom decided this wasn’t a suitable solution because, as she explained it to me, antibiotics wipe out your immune system, and staying on them for long periods of time means your immune system is likely never going to be strong enough to overcome the chronic Lyme symptoms and put the Lyme disease into remission. (Now we know that the Lyme bacteria is actually a spirochete, a spiral-shaped bacteria, which is super tricky and brilliant and morphs to evade many of the common antibiotics for Lyme, hence why people initially feel better while taking antibiotics, but then feel worse.) So my mother declined antibiotics as chronic Lyme treatment for me, and we then began a journey through the world of Lyme disease natural treatment to get me and my brother better.

Beginning to Explore the World of Lyme Disease Natural Treatment

We began by trying several natural remedies for Lyme disease, some of which were pretty whacky and “out there”, and some of which were more evidence-based and standard. But all of them required time and money, which highlights one of the unfortunate realities of healing chronic Lyme symptoms or any chronic health issue: those without time or money to dedicate to taking care of themselves have a much harder time healing.

We did so many things in those few years that I was sick. I can remember visiting a Chinese herbalist in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens, New York, and having to drink some disgustingly bitter herbal teas, which had antibacterial as well as immune-boosting properties, daily. It stunk up our whole house, and as you can imagine, put a serious damper on my popularity for playdates .I believe I did this tea-based herbal therapy for Lyme for at least several months if not over a year. Since then, I have learned a lot about the incredible healing power of herbs for chronic Lyme symptoms from my interview with Lyme expert Dr. Bill Rawls as well as from the Johns Hopkins Lyme and Tickborne Diseases Research and Education Institute. 

In another attempt to get rid of my chronic Lyme symptoms, I took supplements with breakfast and dinner and avoided (with some exceptions, I was a kid after all) dairy, processed foods, and gluten (although back then we just called it wheat). About a year after my Lyme diagnosis, I wasn’t getting better and my mother took me to Mankato, Minnesota to see a dairy farmer who helped us do a treatment called Hyperimmune Bovine Colostrum Therapy (HBCT). Colostrum is the milk produced during her first few days of lactating after giving birth (humans and cows alike produce it!). Hyperimmune Colostrum is produced by cows that have received vaccinations against specific disease-causing organisms (in my case, Lyme). The Lyme vaccination then causes the cows to develop antibodies to fight Lyme, which then pass into the colostrum, which I then drank. HBCT was I believe in orphan drug phase at the time (around 1996-1997) which means the FDA believes it can be effective but needs a drug company to pay for the clinical trials and “sponsor” the treatment to come to market, so it was technically illegal for us to be using this therapy when we did. But we were desperate, and my mother had heard that it could be quite effective.

We stayed in a Motel 6 for three weeks in the stifling heat of the Minnesota summer, going back and forth each day to a dairy farm swarming with flies. I had my blood taken several times (by my mother in a car!) and then I believe it was injected into the lactating cow, who then produced colostrum that we packed up several frozen gallons of to take back to New York. I walked around school in seventh grade with a little freezer bag for my colostrum and swished a few ounces around under my tongue every few hours for months. Needless to say, my twelve-year-old self thought this treatment was pretty insane.

As a recent update, there was a published phase one clinical trial in June 2022 using HBCT for the Covid-19 virus. It was deemed successful with the study authors noting “in conclusion, generation of IgG and neutralizing antibodies was successful in the bovine colostrum which is safe for consumption.”

Finding Natural Remedies for Lyme Disease that Actually Work

The very last summer that I was acutely sick with Lyme, I was taken to a Hyperbaric Oxygen facility in Lancaster, PA (Amish country) for another three-week stay. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) uses highly pressurized air (three times that of normal air pressure) to hyper-oxygenate your blood (via your lungs). The oxygen travels through your body and, according to the Mayo Clinic, “helps fight bacteria and stimulate the release of substances called growth factors and stem cells, which promote healing”. I remember lying in this tanning bed-looking machine every day for a few hours and just breathing deeply. Finally, my health began to turn around by the time I was about 13 or 14.

My brother took longer to recover because I believe his Lyme had been untreated for longer than mine, and his symptoms seemed more severe than mine. He was taken out of his highly competitive elementary school at age nine, and went through less rigorous schools and was then homeschooled for the rest of his childhood. His joint pain subsided sometime in his mid to late teens and his brain recovered enough for him to attend and graduate from a top tier university, though his gut microbiome has never quite been the same. 

Unfortunately, here isn’t one natural Lyme treatment for everyone to kill off chronic Lyme symptoms, because it depends on a lot of factors: the makeup of your gut bacteria and the strength of your immune system; whether you are battling any other viruses, parasites or bacteria at the same time; how long you’ve had Lyme untreated; whether you also got co-infections in the tick bite; and many other factors. I offer my story and the natural remedies for Lyme Disease that I used to get better (through my mother’s research and actions, as she was in charge of my care at the time) as a place to start exploring if you’re looking for ways to treat Lyme disease — but they may not work for everyone. 

I recognize now that many of the treatments my mom researched and tried for us were experimental, but she had such determination to get us better that eventually one or a combination of several of them (we’ll never be able to know which were effective and which weren’t since many were used in conjunction) worked to put the chronicLyme symptoms into remission and restore my immune system’s ability to keep the Lyme disease from rearing its ugly head. I will be forever grateful for my mom’s ability to think outside the box and for her ferocious determination to research all the options, from the conventional to the very “woo woo.” She did all this in a pre-Google era (I mean remember Altavista?!) when information about natural remedies for Lyme disease, and about Lyme disease in general, was not readily available. 

My mom taught me these three important lessons: 1) knowledge is power, 2) where this is a will there’s a way, and 3) that the world of integrative medicine and holistic healthcare, which I previously thought of as “woo woo” and full of quacks and hippies, was really full of (mostly, I can’t speak for all) practitioners and doctors willing to think, learn, and treat differently from conventional healthcare providers, sometimes at tremendous risk to their reputation.

From these practitioners, I learned the power of courage, conviction, and standing up for truth and medical freedom, no matter what the cost. Lyme disease can be truly heartbreaking and debilitating. I feel incredibly lucky to be on the other side of it, and will continue to bring attention and advocacy to all of those lying in bed right now, who have been exhausted and bedridden perhaps for years or even decades, with antibiotic IV drips in their arms and with seemingly no end in sight and no light at the end of the tunnel. 

For anyone reading this in that state, know this: there is light, you can heal, you just have to think a bit outside of the box and fight for your right to heal in whatever way is needed, not whatever way is accepted by the medical establishment and insurance companies. Lastly, it’s important to remember that you have to do the work, even though you feel awful and have zero energy and motivation. You have to follow the strict diet, take the supplements, take the herbs, get in the tank, or whatever natural remedies for Lyme disease you can access and ultimately whatever ends up working for you. Keep trying different things until something begins to work but also remember that you have to be patient. No natural treatment starts to work without doing it for at least a few months. Healing from Lyme is a one-day-at-a-time, and it will likely take months if not years to fully put chronic Lyme symptoms into remission, but it can happen, so have faith and determination. 

Watch my full story below, or listen on The getWellBe Podcast.

Have you or someone you love had experience with chronic Lyme symptoms or natural remedies for Lyme Disease that were effective? I’d love to hear what you or their experience was or is in the comments section below.

Citations:

1. Rudenko, N., Golovchenko, M., Kybicova, K. et al. Metamorphoses of Lyme disease spirochetes: phenomenon of Borrelia persisters. Parasites Vectors 12, 237 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-019-3495-7
2. Bennett MH, et al. Emerging indications for hyperbaric oxygen. Current Opinions in Anesthesiology. 2019; doi:10.1097/ACO.0000000000000773.

The recovery story above is anecdotal and specific to this particular individual. Please note that this is not medical advice, and that not all treatments and approaches mentioned will work for everyone.