The Most Misdiagnosed Disease in America (How to Heal from Lyme disease)

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Hey everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the show. Today, we'll be diving deep into a topic around Lyme disease, which isn't just about a tick bite, but a full-blown attack on your body's energy, immune system, and even your brain that requires more than just antibiotics for a cure.

Now, before I dive in though, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the link in the show notes to subscribe to my weekly wellness newsletter to get my top tips for natural healing, delivered straight to your inbox.

Now, this is something that I've had a lot of clinical experience with, and there are so many people— we're talking about tens of thousands of people struggling with Lyme disease, and many of them don't know it. In fact, uh, now, now overall, there are millions of people that have Lyme disease around the world and are suffering from it.

But within the United States alone, we know that there are numerous people that actually have Lyme And it's what's causing them to have low energy. It's what's causing their immune system to be weak. It's what's causing them to also live with issues like long COVID and other immunodeficiencies. And many of them don't realize that they have Lyme in the first place.

And the symptoms differ from person to person, and sometimes they might seem like another condition like hypothyroidism or chronic fatigue or just somebody having a weak immune system. But many of these people are living with Lyme and they don't realize it.

And many people people assume that Lyme disease presents the same way for everyone, but these symptoms are typically nonspecific and they vary and can fluctuate due to something called mitochondrial dysfunction and cellular energy imbalances.

And that's really what I'm going to go through today, is how if you truly want to heal and reverse Lyme disease, you have to heal it at the cellular level, and it starts with the health of your mitochondria. Now, I want to share this stat: about 7% of people with Lyme disease have no noticeable symptoms. And about 1 in 6 with Lyme disease do not experience the telltale bullseye rash.

Some experience mostly fatigue or joint pain, while others have headaches, others have neurological symptoms, others have cardiovascular symptoms. And so you can see here across the board, there are many different symptoms associated with Lyme disease, some people having no symptoms whatsoever. And the most common way that this is treated today is via antibiotic drugs.

But the reality is, most of the time, Antibiotics don't cure Lyme. Lyme bacteria—it's known as Borrelia burgdorferi—is highly adaptable, and once a deer tick or a black tick bites you, bacteria actually can evade your immune system and persist in different organs and tissues.

So what happens is people will go and take an antibiotic drug, typically oral, sometimes IV, and this will get you know into your digestive system. It'll get somewhat into your blood, but Lyme infections can be hiding. In your liver and in your fat cells and different areas of your body where sometimes the antibiotics don't fully penetrate.

And so people will go and get on these antibiotic drugs, and here's the sad truth of what happens: they kill off a lot of the good bacteria in their body, a lot of the pro-organisms that are helping them heal and strengthening their immune system. Well, when they go and take that antibiotic, if they don't fully kill the Lyme, well, now they get worse.

And I have seen this with thousands of Lyme patients. Again, they go and they get on prescription antibiotics and they get on 'em again and again and again, and their Lyme symptoms just get worse and worse and worse because they've completely exhausted their gut microbiome, which is where 70% of their immune system lives.

So if you have Lyme disease, the last thing you wanna do is just go and take antibiotics without doing all of the right other things that we're gonna go through today. So you can't just focus on killing the bacteria. You need to focus on mitochondrial repair and strengthening your organ system. So here's the key, so your body can heal itself.

There's two— again, there's a couple ways to go about treating Lyme.

Most people say, okay, I'm going to go and take an antibiotic and the antibiotic's going to kill the Lyme infection, versus what the ancient Chinese medicine approach is, is no, we are going to go and strengthen up your own cellular mitochondria, strengthen your gut, strengthen up your own immune system, and your own immune system Will go and create compounds that will kill the Lyme and keep it in check.

That's how you truly heal and reverse Lyme disease. And Lyme bacteria, I wanna mention, doesn't just cause infections. They go and it hijacks your mitochondria and your cells, decreasing your body's cellular energy production. And when I've worked with Lyme patients, one of the biggest things that we will see is low energy.

And again, a lot of people think, oh, I maybe have hormone imbalance, or I've been working too hard, or it's stress, or it's cortisol, or it's adrenal fatigue, or it's hypothyroidism, when in fact it's Lyme and it's going and damaging their mitochondria. And your mitochondria are responsible for producing energy essential for all of your body's functions.

In Lyme disease, harmful bacteria actually gets inside the cell in the mitochondria, which leads to something called oxidative stress. And research indicates that Lyme disease patients exhibit Increased levels of mitochondria superoxide, which is a type of reactive oxygen species that damages cellular structures and impairs mitochondrial efficiency.

Now, I know those are a lot of scientific words, but basically it's this: the pathogen, the bug, gets into your cell, goes deeper into your body's power plant. So think about this. It's like you've got a A, uh, imagine you've got this electrical box with all of these wires that can't get wet, and then you throw water on it and it short-circuits everything. That's what these bugs are doing.

They're crawling into your cells, into your mitochondria, and they are damaging your body's power plants. Imagine a city, okay? So you've got a power plant that's running an entire city, keeping all the lights on. Well, you then have somebody break into the power plant And then go and then take a big sledgehammer and start just bashing in structures all over the place.

And then the lights start going out in the city and all of these different areas. That's what the Lyme infection is doing to your mitochondria of your cell. And so one of the biggest things we have to do in order to heal yourself— now here's the other thing.

Your mitochondria are also, also responsible for supplying energy to the organ systems like your immune system that needs to go and kill the Lyme. So we have to do a couple things simultaneously if we wanna reverse Lyme disease. One, we have to go and start to fix and heal your mitochondria. 2, We've gotta go and fix the organ systems that are responsible for killing Lyme.

And in particular, it tends to be your gut microbiome and your adrenal glands are very, very important when it comes to reversing Lyme disease. I wanna mention this as well. So we talked about oxidative stress in relation to Lyme disease and mitochondrial dysfunction. Number 2, as I mentioned, And as I mentioned, energy production is impaired when you have Lyme disease.

That's the second thing that happens. And so again, every Lyme patient almost has profound fatigue and energy loss. And number 3, I'll start to see Lyme patients have neurological issues. Uh, it could be brain fog, it could be depression, anxiety, other mood disorders, even psychiatric problems. Uh, but, but these neurological disorders are showing up due to, um, the mitochondrial damage.

And then another thing that tends to be impacted here— I mentioned another important organ system— are your adrenal glands. And there's something called your HPA axis. That stands for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

And this plays a crucial role in Lyme disease in terms of your body getting put into this fight-or-flight state when you're— because your body's having to fight infections, or a single infection in Lyme. And this infection alters your gut microbiome balance, impacting neurotransmitter production.

So what happens is this— I, I mentioned before, you have this sort of what's called a neuroendocrine— your brain impacting your adrenal glands, which then impacts cortisol, and then those start to impact your gut. And your gut is responsible for creating neurotransmitters and hormones like serotonin.

And this is why people start to have depression, anxiety, lack of motivation, just feeling so lethargic all the time, is because this organ system is impacted when it comes to Lyme disease. And what Lyme actually does, this bacteria, is Lyme forms something called biofilms.

And these biofilms act like a— imagine almost like a, a spider web or a thick, uh, kind of, um, film that starts to lay, lay over, um, your body's receptor sites or starts to affect your gut lining.

And what happens is your body can't absorb critical nutrients like magnesium and zinc and iron, which are essential for methylation, for cellular energy production, for the health of the mitochondria, even for neurotransmitter production such as hormones like dopamine and serotonin and GABA, which help you sleep, help you have energy, help you have a good— be in a good mood.

And this mitochondrial dysfunction caused by Lyme also reduces your brain energy levels. Levels, which impairs cognitive function and even decision-making, and connected with— again, I mentioned brain fog earlier. And another thing that Lyme does with these biofilms is it creates neurotoxic byproducts like quinolitic acid, which can accumulate in the brain due to a Lyme infection.

And this leads to worsening symptoms, inflammation, hypercoagulation, and impaired blood flow by Lyme disease. This contributes to the brain fog, the headache, the mental fatigue, and also It creates trauma in your body. Some people even have PTSD from these Lyme symptoms due to these infections.

And as I mentioned before, antibiotics alone rarely eradicate Lyme completely because it lays dormant in your cells and in certain organs. And when you take antibiotics, you continue to weaken your immune system, which then actually makes it easier for Lyme to persist with other co-infections. Like Epstein-Barr, CMV, Babesia, Bartonella, uh, Candida.

And what happens is, is sometimes with many people I've noticed with Lyme, they don't just have one infection, they've got multiple infections. Again, they have Lyme, they have Epstein-Barr, they have long COVID, they have Bartonella, Candida, all of these infections. And so you're not just fighting one.

I'm— imagine, you know, when you have the common cold, how bad you feel when you have one virus, if you have a cold or flu. Now imagine many of the people with Lyme disease today, and they're not dealing with just one Lyme, they're dealing with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 different co-infections, these microbial overgrowths.

And so it's like almost no matter what they do, they can't seem to get over the hump. However, I will tell you, in working with thousands of patients and helping them reverse Lyme symptoms, and I have so many with Lyme that, that They had Lyme, their entire life was a wreck, and by going through the right process were able to get free.

But the reason why myself and other practitioners who prac— practice like me were able to help them was we didn't just say, here's an antibiotic, cuz that does not fix the root of the issue. Why did you get— listen, as I mentioned before, there are people that have Lyme disease and have zero symptoms, have absolute zero. Why is that?

Cuz their immune system is strong enough and their mitochondria are strong enough. That even though it might be living dormant somewhere in their body, their body just kind of keeps it at bay cuz their immune system's strong enough to do that. If your immune system is not strong enough, that, that's the real issue.

And even if you get rid of the Lyme somehow and it disappeared, you're still not gonna be well because you have these other co-infections that, that your immune system's not strong enough to deal with. So here's the key. If you are going to reverse and heal Lyme disease, we have to go and focus on strengthen your immune system and strengthen your mitochondria. That's the key.

It's strengthening your own body so your body can heal itself. These antibiotics aren't gonna heal you. They can relieve some of the burden, but if you don't, if it doesn't do it completely, now you're way worse than you were before cuz you killed off the good bacteria. So we have to have a different strategy.

Now, one of the things I wanna mention here that I believe is critically important for you healing is activating natural killer cells. They're called NK cells. And you can do this through the use of diet, herbs, and even detoxification therapies.

And it's a powerful way to restore immune surveillance and fight persistent infections because these cells help find— they're called seek and destroy cells. They seek out the Lyme in different areas where they're hiding in the body and they destroy them. Imagine it's like a Navy SEAL team. These NK cells are a Navy SEAL team going into a remote area.

Yeah.

In killing things silently and leaving. That, that's how it works. And so you can activate natural killer cells in your own body. Now, the CDC estimates that nearly 500,000 people each year develop Lyme disease in the US alone. Think about that. That's half a million people every year are developing Lyme disease, but only about 60,000 cases are reported each year.

We're talking about, we're talking about only about, you know, 12 to 13%. The actual number of Lyme cases might be 6 to 12 times higher than what's reported. And many cases go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. As I mentioned earlier, Lyme can be confused with conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, even anxiety, depression, or autoimmune disease.

It can lay dormant or stealth as these infections do. And this is why most people don't realize they have it. One study that was published in the BMC Infectious Disease Journal found that 54% of patients who didn't present with a typical Lyme rash had been previously misdiagnosed with something else.

Even when a rash was present, 23% of cases were initially missed or misdiagnosed, and 41% of misdiagnosed patients were given antibiotics that were ineffective against Lyme disease. It just drives me crazy. So many doctors, they just throw antibiotics at everything and then make the person worse. So it's going to take longer for them to heal.

This is why you'd be so much better off doing ultra-high-dose probiotics, which I'll, which I'll get into here in a minute. Okay. Now I wanna get into testing here for a moment, and then we're gonna get into the diet, the herbs, the lifestyle, uh, medicine in terms of how to heal this. But testing is not always reliable. Many standards testing for Lyme are inaccurate.

This leads to what are called false negatives or delayed treatment. Uh, the standard Lyme test known as the ELISA or Western blot are notoriously inaccurate, especially in the earlier chronic stages. One study found that 60% of patients test negative in the early stages of Lyme disease. By the way, I experienced this myself with an infection.

I had a spinal infection that almost killed me a couple years ago, and it left me not able to walk for a year. And I went in and got an MRI and got tested 6 weeks after all of these symptoms were so severe, and my MRI didn't show, didn't show anything. And so I thought, well, I guess I don't have an infection.

Well, then I went back a couple months later, and then the infection is raging throughout my disc and my spinal— in, in my, in, in my, my disc, my bone. And so this happens. So people will go into their doctor saying, I've got long COVID, I have Lyme, I've— and the doctors say, well, I did the test, it's not showing anything. But it's because it's the early onset.

And then what happens later on is the infection has maybe got out of your blood, but it's hiding now in other areas. So you can do a blood test. Test and it doesn't show up. So that's one of the issues with Lyme is so many people have it and they don't realize it because they've had it for so long or it's their early onset.

The other thing we're seeing here with Lyme is cases are rising according to Johns Hopkins University.

The annual number of tick-borne diseases has more than doubled in the United States in the last 20 years, and Lyme is believed to be more widespread in recent years due to Increased tick populations, ecological changes when you have rising heat and humidity in certain areas or, or lack of COVID that can cause an issue and increased global travel. That's another big one.

Now, I want to mention something that is highly controversial, and that is this: is Lyme disease manmade? There are some researchers that have speculated that Lyme disease may have originated from a government bioweapons research facility, particularly at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. And the reality is we don't know for sure.

I do think that people are questioning this more since, since we realize it's almost certain that the COVID-19 virus was created in a lab with animals in China, right? So, so we know that now with almost certainty. And it's like, okay, the question is, Is that the only time that's ever happened?

Do you think maybe because they've been doing this for so long in so many areas around the world that maybe this has happened another time? There's another disease like this that's out there. Um, and this is why some people do believe that it is possible that, that Lyme disease is one of those things.

And I don't know for sure, and it really at this point I would say doesn't matter much because the treatments and the way of healing it still needs to be the same in the way that we're going to talk about it today.

And no matter what you do, you need to treat Lyme because here's what If it goes untreated, Lyme disease be— can become chronic, and it severely impacts the nervous system, the heart, the immune system. And there are people who might have some of these symptoms, and they've just kind of put it, put it off as, I'm getting older, or think it's something else.

But, but if, if you're— if you think you— if you're treating, you know, fibromyalgia, And you don't actually have fibromyalgia, you have Lyme disease, you know, some of the way you're going to treat fibromyalgia, it's, it's not going to fix your issue. It's not going to fix the Lyme.

And so we absolutely want to make sure that you have Lyme or, or do everything we can to find out if you have Lyme and then go and treat that directly. And one of the things that I found clinically is the longer that Lyme persists, oftentimes the harder it is to treat.

Now, I do want to say I've had people that have just been bitten with a tick and we've reversed it in a, you know, in a month or a few months. I mean, very quickly. And I've had other people who have had it for 10, 20 years, and we've still been able to reverse it, but typically it does take longer.

And one of the things that happens when you have Lyme long-term, because of this chronic state of inflammation, is it starts to affect and impact many other things. As I mentioned, again, it can cause permanent neurological damage, you know, um, you know, anxiety, depression, dementia-like symptoms. The other thing is Lyme carditis. There's actually a term called Lyme carditis.

Think about even myocarditis, which is caused by COVID. Having that virus for too long. But, but Lyme carditis— in rare cases, Lyme bacteria can infect the heart, causing life-threatening complications like sudden cardiac arrest. And of course, the biggest thing I'll see is autoimmune disease.

Untreated Lyme triggers autoimmune responses, leading to issues like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, multiple, uh, MS-like symptoms. So we start to see that if it's not fixed.

So what we need to do is we need to start focus on healing your body, particularly the mitochondria, the gut microbiome, and even focusing on areas like the adrenals and gut, because that's really tied to those organ systems. So let me go through the ideal diet and dietary changes most people need.

Now, I do believe that you should follow a personalized approach, and if you do want help with this, I would like to mention that there are some amazing practitioners out there. You want to find somebody that specializes in Lyme disease, somebody that practices more of that functional medicine or Chinese medicine.

I do wanna mention the, the institute that I'm a part of, it's called The Health Institute. This is something where we work with Lyme patients and helping them heal, but you wanna find a good practitioner in many cases. But here, and, and the reason I bring that up is many of you want a more personalized approach. But let me go through the dietary principles that I found have most helped people.

Number one, this is, I'm being very obvious here. But you gotta eliminate the processed foods and inflammatory foods, ultra-processed foods, added sugars, seed oils, refined grains. These are gonna just lead to— they fuel the infections. Bacteria like Lyme and yeast like Candida, they love to feed off of sugar. They love to feed off of wheat, you know, wheat products and, and processed flours.

That's what they, that's what they live for. They love what's called in Chinese medicine a damp environment, which is caused by a lot of seed oils and a lot of sugar and a lot of refined carbs. In fact, And fake foods, additives. It creates an environment like, like imagine that they're fish. You're giving them a big lake to swim in versus draining the swamp. Okay?

So, so, so you need to drain the swamp, get rid of the sugar if you're gonna heal. And then you wanna focus on a diet that is very, very microbiome friendly and adrenal friendly. Okay? So you wanna focus on getting a lot of organic meat that's nutrient dense. Grass-fed beef, pastured chicken, wild-caught fish. So you wanna do a lot of those organic meats.

And, and what's even better, the best thing you could probably eat is organ meat. Now you could take that as a supplement, but liver in particular, or heart, is very healing. You know, there's a, there's a, a, a food brand, uh, called Forces of Nature, and they have grass-fed beef and bison and elk and those sort of meats, and they'll put in heart and liver in there.

Um, And so you're getting some of the organ meats and you really don't taste it in the meat. So that's one, a one good way to get that. But you want to do, you know, and buy wild sockeye salmon. So you wanna do the wild organic meat. You wanna do a lot of organic vegetables that are cooked, no raw, just cooked vegetables for the most part.

So you wanna do a lot of soups, chicken vegetable soup, beef stew. This is the easiest to digest, the most nourishing. Think about this, your foods, it should be very nourishing to your body. So soups, organic meat, organic vegetables, berries, pomegranate, and figs. These foods are the highest in nutrients that are going to help protect your body from oxidative stress and oxidative damage.

Remember that earlier we talked about that, that one of the biggest things that starts to happen in Lyme is it causes this oxidative stress where you're— it ages your cells, it makes your cells sick. So berries, blueberries in particular, goji berries. And in addition, again, pomegranates are one of my absolute favorites for this. And you could do a pomegranate powder.

Um, tart cherry juice is also good, but those really dark red, especially in purplish colors, are going to be the most healing for that cellular mitochondria and the most protective. Now you also want to get some healthy fats— extra virgin olive oil, Coconut oil. Those are the— if you're going to do fat, those are the 2 most important is extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil. Also consider avocados.

You could consider doing some seeds like a little bit of flaxseed. And in nuts, I would recommend if you're going to do those Brazil nuts along with walnuts, and then you could also do a little bit of avocado. When it comes to any other sources of carbohydrates, I would say sweet potatoes, And rice are probably the best.

But you really want to focus— your diet should be mostly organic meat, cooked vegetables, some of those berries and pomegranates and superfruits we talked about a little bit. You could do a little bit of walnuts and Brazil nuts and flaxseeds, and then extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, um, a little bit of sweet potato, avocado. But, but really, that's the diet right there. And mostly soups.

Okay. Lots of cooked foods like that. And then if you wanted to have a dip, for instance, you could do like a grass-fed burger with steamed vegetables, uh, with something like a homemade hummus. Okay, garbanzo beans, tahini, sea salt, garlic, cumin. You know, herbs are also very good and very healing— ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, clove, rosemary— um, in, in your cooking and eating as well.

And that, that's ideal. I do want to mention some other things you want to remove. You got to be really careful of foods that help promote infections, like moldy foods, uh, in particular grains. Uh, for the most part, you want to be mostly grain-free. Now, I think for some people, a little bit of millet, uh, or a little bit of rice, if you tolerate it well, is probably okay.

But outside of that, you want to just eliminate all grains. Coffee— there's a lot of mold on coffee, a lot of biotoxins. Peanuts— one of the worst foods you could ever eat. Bread— stay away from these foods completely. And you in particular wanna focus on, as I mentioned, um, a very nutrient-dense diet that's also very easy to digest.

Now, another food group I do wanna mention that I wanna encourage you to eat is mushrooms, particularly maitake mushrooms. You can go to a place like Whole Foods Market or Sprouts or certain grocery stores and buy maitake mushrooms. Now, you can also get other medicinal mushrooms like shiitake and other, uh, mushrooms that have something called beta-glucans. These support that cellular energy.

So remember, Remember earlier when we talked about NK cells? We want to activate those NK cells that are— they seek out Lyme and destroy Lyme. Mushrooms are one of the most powerful foods on the planet to help you do that, okay? Boosting up those NK cells. So you want to do the mushrooms there, the steamed green leafy vegetables like spinach and kale. Again, they have to be cooked.

The berries are going to be helpful with that. And there are other herbs that help do that. One of my favorites being matcha green tea, okay?

Drinking matcha.

If you want support and energy in the morning, much better option than coffee is doing a sencha or a matcha. Green tea is super powerful at supporting boosting your body's NK cells. And then, you want to do more adaptogenic herbs that help support that HPA axis, getting your body out of that fight-or-flight state, calming down those cortisol levels.

And, this is where I absolutely love astragalus, Ginseng, Codonopsis. These are herbs that have been used in Chinese medicine to also— and they've also been shown in clinical studies, especially astragalus, to go and kill off Lyme. And so again, ginseng and astragalus are great for this in particular. Are you tired of doctors dismissing your symptoms, or worse, even making you feel crazy?

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In this state, cells close off and don't properly take in or utilize the hormones or nutrients they need from the bloodstream. Now, this makes the blood work often appear normal, so doctors often miss the deeper issue, leaving you feeling tired, gaining weight, experiencing mood swings, and dealing with other symptoms while other cells remain in a state of limbo.

Visit beyondbloodwork.com to learn how you can start changing this in as little as 30 days. I also want to mention again, remember, soups and stews, congee, You know, if you want to do a smoothie, here's what to do. Buy some pumpkin or butternut squash or sweet potato, put that in a blender with some hot water, and then add in some pumpkin pie spice.

Add in some vanilla-flavored plant protein, collagen-based protein, or stem cell, or a, or, or a bone broth type protein. So, and get about 30 to 40 grams of protein, and it's almost like a, like a sweet potato or butternut squash or pumpkin soup. But that's much better than doing a cold smoothie. Cold fruit smoothies are not going to be good for you in these cases.

Okay, but again, we want to support your mitochondrial function. That's where ginseng, astragalus, and one other big one, uh, rhodiola, are very, very good at helping heal and strengthen up your mitochondria. Very, very good for this as well. Um, and, and I would also recommend taking— now I did mention eating Maitake and shiitake mushrooms. And you can add those into a chicken vegetable soup.

You can just make a mushroom soup or mushroom and beef soup. You— there are really some great recipes with mushrooms and chicken, mushrooms and beef in different soups you can make, or adding it into something like a rice congee is great as well. In addition, you can take mushroom supplements.

I would recommend one that has turkey tail, which has antiviral and bacterial properties, along with reishi, and cordyceps. These are really going to support your overworked adrenals and help strengthen up your immunity. Um, and, and so those in particular are going to be very, very healing, and especially the reishi and turkey tail when it comes to activating your body's NK cells.

And again, turkey tail is also very good at activating and strengthening your, your, uh, your NK cells, which is something you have to have happen. Now, I also want to mention some holistic treatments. I love acupuncture. Acupuncture is going to help bring blood flow and energy to areas that need healing. And help eradicate Lyme.

So seeing an acupuncturist weekly helps improve blood flow, reduces inflammation, supports your adrenals getting back to where they need to be. That is powerful. And now an acupuncturist oftentimes can do a treatment called moxibustion where they can help enhance your detox pathways. That's another treatment you might consider.

Um, and then also things like qigong, deep breathing, doing breathing exercises for about 10 minutes a day of, of qigong. That's spelled Q-I-G-O-N-G. You can even look up on Amazon, a 10-minute Qigong practice. Start doing that daily and you won't be— you will be shocked after, after doing that.

If you do that daily for 1 month, what will start to happen to your immune system and start to happen to your energy levels. Qigong and acupuncture are 2 of the most powerful treatments you could ever do to kill Lyme. And I bet less than 1% of Lyme patients are doing those. Another therapy I love for healing Lyme is red light therapy.

Now, red and near-infrared light therapy, they help stimulate mitochondrial function Improving your cellular energy production. It also reduces inflammation throughout your body, everything from your brain to your joints. Studies show it enhances tissue repair, circulation, and immune function. It's very complementary for Lyme recovery.

And there is a medical study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Neuroscience, and here's what they found: photobiomodulation, the therapeutic use of specific wavelengths of light, is a safe approach shown to have anti-inflammatory effects due to cytokine expression modulation. So it's going to reduce inflammation and activate and heal mitochondria. It's incredibly powerful.

Now, here's another therapy I love, and I like this a lot better than antibiotics because it's not going to kill off the good bacteria, and that's ozone therapy. Ozone therapy increases the oxygenation in the body, creating an environment where Lyme bacteria struggle to survive. It also helps with detoxification and immune cell activation.

Now, the methods include ozone IV therapy, rectal insufflation, and ozone saunas. Now, I do think that ozone IV therapy is the most powerful, and there they— you have standard ozone IV therapy. You then have one level up from that, and it's called 10-pass, where they actually do 10 times as much. It's 10 passes of ozone.

And then the most powerful An innovative, which just came out a few years ago in the United States, is called EBOO. That's E-B-O-O. Is about 5 to 10 times more powerful than 10-pass, and it's the most effective at killing Lyme. Again, it's called EBOO, E-B-O-O. And there are very few practitioners that have this, but you could look at the largest city in your area.

For instance, you know, if, if you're in— like, I'm in Nashville, Tennessee, and if I look up EBOO, E-B-O-O, Clinic Nashville, like EBOO Ozone. So look up EBOO Ozone Clinic Nashville and then call and try and find someone in my area. You might be able to find someone in your area, but this is where you typically get at least 3 rounds of this ozone in your blood.

And what you want to do with Lyme disease is you want to do all of these things simultaneously. You want to be building up your body, so doing the red light therapy, Getting acupuncture, you want to get on that diet I talked about. You want to take the supplements and then also start doing things like ozone. You want to follow a multi-pronged approach.

You want to do the right diet, the right supplements, the right herbs, the right holistic treatments like acupuncture, the right treatments like ozone. Do those together to get your best results. And the patients I've helped completely heal and eradicate it the fastest—that was what we did. We took that multi-pronged approach, and we were patient with it.

One thing I see with a lot of Lyme patients as well is— and by the way, it is so hard. I know it is so hard to not obsess about your condition and make it the only thing that is your life's about, where you're researching and constantly thinking or living in a state of negativity. But it is so important that you live in a state of gratitude and you operate with a level of relaxation as well.

And you go and do the treatments just knowing, I'm going to heal. But, but you don't do it in, in, in just adding to the million things you have going on.

What, what I see with a lot of people with Lyme is sometimes they're so busy, they're still trying to fight through the Lyme and they're busy and, and, and then they try and add healing on top of it, like doing more therapies, but they're so busy that they can't fully heal.

So it's important that you also create some margin, some downtime, some time to rest and heal when you're going through some of these therapies. Now, I want to mention some other things that I think are powerful when it comes to healing Lyme disease. And one of those is high-dose probiotic therapy and taking antimicrobials, taking spore-based probiotics like Bacillus subtilis.

There's a very particular strain called AB22. It's the most powerful probiotic on the planet for killing Lyme, in my professional opinion. These spore-based probiotics that are known as soil-based organisms are incredibly powerful. And one study found that That patients who had Lyme disease had much, much worse microbial dysbiosis than people that didn't.

And so we see that Lyme is affecting the gut microbiome very negatively. And so it's incredibly important that you take soil-based organisms because they start to clear out the bad bacteria. So you wanna do higher dose probiotics. My patients with Lyme, I have them take 1 trillion probiotics a day. Okay, okay, you hear what I said?

It's not— it's not because most people are taking 10 billion, 50 billion, maybe even 100 billion. I'm talking about 10 times that amount, 1 trillion daily. And part of the reason you— and, and this is especially important if you've ever taken antibiotics as well, because likely Lyme combined with antibiotics have completely wiped out your good flora.

So you have to do very, very high dose for a longer period of time. Of a trillion probiotics a day. So I would go and look up something and look up a probiotic that has a trillion probiotics. Now, in addition, when you're taking these probiotics, you can also focus on killing some of the Lyme using some natural antibacterial herbals like oil of oregano, berberine, garlic are all fantastic.

And so this makes a more inhospitable environment for Lyme.

Yeah.

And so that's another thing that you can do internally that I think is a great idea. And there are some great practitioners out there that are doing really great things in treating Lyme. And there's actually a protocol that was created by a practitioner. It's called Booner's Lyme Protocol.

And this Booner's Lyme Protocol includes taking antimicrobial herbs like Japanese knotweed to reduce inflammation and inhibit bacterial growth, cat's claw to enhance immune response, and take Andrographis for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.

Wow.

So taking these together, I have another friend named Dr. Christopher Motley, and Dr. Motley is also a Lyme expert. He's treated so many patients with this, and he's been a guest on my podcast. You can go back and listen to our past episodes.

And Dr. Chris and I recommend a blend of a lot of what we talked about— cat's claw, Japanese knotweed, Andrographis— and also we really like the herbs that I tend to recommend, which are astragalus, ginseng, as well for this are very, very powerful at killing Lyme.

One of the things I really like about Booner's Lyme Protocol is it incorporates biofilm disruptors like lumbrokinase and serrapeptase to break down the protective layers that Lyme bacteria form. These are specific enzyme supplements that break down those biofilms that allow your body to finally heal. So as I mentioned, again, you want a multi-pronged approach.

Remember, Even when you're taking supplements, you want a supplement that's going to support mitochondrial health. You want to take supplements that also help kill the bacteria, supplements that help destroy the biofilm, right? So, so, you know, there are certain things you need to do here.

And then probiotics, of course, to really help strengthen up and transform your gut microbiome, which is going to boost your immune system and help you kill the infection simultaneously. You know, I wanna mention a success story of an example of, of a few people that have dealt with Lyme disease. Um, there's a well-known wellness advocate. Her name's Mackenzie Vath.

She struggled with years for Lyme before turning to holistic treatments like ozone therapy and Rife treatments, which dramatically improved her symptoms. Now, Rife is something we haven't talked about, but it's a specific frequency machine that helps kill off certain types of pathogens like parasites. And Lyme bacteria.

That's another treatment you could look for, Rife, R-I-F-E, as part of your treatment protocol. Also, uh, celebrities— Justin Bieber in particular, he publicly shared his struggle with chronic Lyme when he was diagnosed in 2020, and he emphasized the importance of alternative therapies in a holistic approach, which helped him heal.

And there are so many other cases and stories of people online who tried the conventional way of just doing antibiotics, which by the way, it work for a very small fraction of people, but for the most people, it doesn't work. They'll get treated with antibiotics and they'll get worse and worse and worse. And remember this, the earlier you— the earlier you treat Lyme, the better.

What I would encourage you to do if you have Lyme or know someone with Lyme, go at it full force, okay? Don't— and don't just try one little thing like, I'm going to try one supplement, or I'm going to try going gluten-free. It's not enough. What you really need to do is say, here's my diet protocol.

I'm going to eat nourishing foods, a lot of soups, a lot of these mitochondrial and gut-boosting foods. Write down the daily diet plan, write down the supplement plan. Make sure you have the biofilm disruptors, the probiotics, the, you know, a trillion, a very, very high dose. You have the immune-supporting herbals, right?

Taking those things together and then consider treatments like ozone, infrared light therapy, and do those things all simultaneously, right? And if you do those things together, and also know sometimes it's a process, sometimes it takes a year. Right? But but you know I'm going to be consistent with doing this over the next year. Your chance of healing is tremendous.

I've had so many patients with Lyme, we and we were able to reverse it when we were patient because listen when your mitochondria some of you your mitochondrial battery is just very low and it's not something you fix in a month. It's something that maybe takes a year to fix. And by the way, this is something I had to deal with this mental battle when I had an infection in my spine.

I had an infection not Lyme, but I had a a, a, a, an infection in my bone, in my disc, and in an abscess in my spinal cord. And it took me almost 3 years to fully heal, but it took, it took me 10 months to be able to walk again.

And I just share that to say, like, I understand what it takes, what it means to have an infection and for it to feel like your life is over and for you to just be, feel discouraged sometimes. And if you're a person with Lyme and you're that person right now and you feel discouraged and you feel like you've tried so many things and it hasn't worked.

Well, just know your body has amazing, amazing capacity to heal. God wants you to be healed. And so I want to encourage you to step back, create a holistic plan, work with a practitioner. If you need help, I would love to help you. I, I've got a virtual practice at The Health Institute. You can go to thehealthinstitute.com and work with one of the practitioners there that I have trained.

And get put on a protocol. So, so that's something you should consider, or go and find one of the great doctors that I talked about as well who might might be able to help you as well. So, you know, so so there are some good practitioners.

There there are a lot that don't probably most are not equipped to deal with this, but there are some that are very very good doing amazing things in treating Lyme. So know that your body has amazing capacity. He'll walk with it in patience, and also have that mindset of gratitude. The more you can do that, that's also a critical part of healing.

So remember today, again, we talked about Lyme being a multi-system infection that requires a multi-pronged approach to heal. And we need to focus on your immune system and your mitochondrial function in order to actually heal from Lyme. And if you can do that, I believe you're going to heal.

I also want to say, hey, thanks you— thank you to all of you who are watching this episode, who are sharing this episode. There are millions of people who need help with Lyme and they don't know how to heal naturally. So I want to say thank you to all of you for sharing this on social or on your text messages, just getting the word out there.

And also thank you to all you subscribers that are on mission with me. Remember, if you're not subscribed, you're missing out. We have so many great guests on the show, so many amazing topics coming up. So don't forget to subscribe because if not, it won't show up in your feed. And, uh, really excited to just be bringing you some amazing content here in the future.

I wanna say thanks so much for listening and watching. I'll see you on the next episode.