shutterstock.com/g/Rapeepat+Pornsipak
TOUCHED BY LYME Excerpt of Chronic, Long-Awaited Book Tackling ‘Lyme-Plus’ by Dorothy Kupcha Leland • book excerpt by Steven Phillips and Dana Parish
C
hronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again is a long-awaited book by Dr. Steven Phillips and Dana Parish. The co-authors—a prominent Lyme disease doctor and a singer/songwriter/advocate who used to be his patient—are well known in the Lyme community. So, it’s initially curious that the book title doesn’t mention the words “Lyme disease”. But that’s explained early on. In their text, Phillips and Parish use the term “Lyme plus” for the dizzying constellation of microbes that can result in a wide variety of persistent symptoms and autoimmune conditions. Lyme disease (by itself) may be only one part of the complex picture. Chronic is divided into two main sections. The first part, “The Root”, debunks commonly held myths about Lyme+ and shows how mainstream medicine has so often gotten its facts wrong. The second part, “The Remedy”, offers practical advice on how to get properly diagnosed and looks at an assortment of treatments that may be useful. The following excerpt from the book is taken from the chapter called “The Myths That Get in the Way”. (This passage includes two myths. The chapter explores many more.)
MYTH: Long-term antibiotic therapy for Lyme is an unproven treatment that’s highly dangerous. FACT: Of course, we want to minimize risks to patients from treatments and maximize benefits. Therapies for most serious diseases can have serious side effects, but the risk of fatality from long-term antibiotic therapy is quite low. Far more deaths have been caused by Lyme+ than by its treatment. The risk of fatal outcomes in the treatment of inflammatory diseases with immunosuppressive agents, and cancer with chemotherapy, is far higher than for antibiotic therapy, but the difference in those diseases is that they are accepted by the CDC as legitimate, therefore the risk is deemed justifiable. But high rates of treatment failures using short-term antibiotic therapy are well documented in the medical literature. It has been clearly demonstrated in study after study 20
Fairfield & Southern Litchfield Counties
eNaturalAwakenings.com
that short-term antibiotics are simply not effective in many cases. This, coupled with published research proving bacterial persistence despite short-term antibiotics, makes the case for longer treatments until better treatments come along. One of the earlier case reports revealing how Lyme disease can survive antibiotic treatment was published by the University of Chicago’s Journal of Infectious Diseases in 1988. A group of Swiss scientists successfully grew B. burgdorferi from joint fluid three months after a fifteen-year-old girl was treated for Bell’s palsy (facial paralysis) due to Lyme disease. She’d been bitten by a tick in Austria but experienced none of the typical symptoms—no rash, malaise, fever, or musculoskeletal pain. It wasn’t until one side of her face drooped that doctors suspected Lyme, after which she underwent the conventional, two-week antibiotic treatment. After initially improving, she relapsed a couple of months later, developing sudden, unexplainable arthritis in her right knee. Her doctors finally found B. burgdorferi in her joint fluid and ordered another round of antibiotics, concluding that a two-week course of antibiotics for Lyme was inadequate. In 1993, a more dramatic report was published out of the Department of Medicine at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado. There, a twenty-four-yearold patient with Lyme arthritis continued to relapse when the antibiotics were stopped. Despite years of oral and IV antibiotics, the researchers found B. burgdorferi in the patient’s joint tissue and joint fluid—proof again that the bacteria can escape the assault of antibiotics. But the IDSA guidelines fail to take studies like these into account. To understand the importance of considering novel treatments to address complicated health challenges—in this case, long-term anti-microbial therapy for Lyme+—it helps to consider other areas in medicine where out-of-the-box thinking eventually revolutionized the field, but only after hard-won battles. It was long thought, for example, that stomach ulcers were caused by diet and stress, for which bland foods, antacids, and meditation were prescribed, without benefits. Such patients went on to suffer, some requiring surgery, and some dying from
