LYME DISEASE TREATMENT: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW FIRST
- Chelsea Azarcon
- Jan 15
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 3
Blog posts are for educational purposes only. This is NOT medical advice. Please consult with a licensed medical professional before making any changes that could impact your health, including those discussed in this blog posts.
If you read my summary of all the ways that Lyme Disease can impact the body and you have a diagnosis of Lyme Disease, you may be eager to treat the Lyme Disease and start feeling better. Because of the widespread damage that Lyme Disease creates in the body, many doctors advocate for initiating Lyme Disease treatment as soon as possible. I disagree.
Remember that Lyme Disease is a powerful inhibitor of the immune system and promoter of inflammation. By the time most people are diagnosed with Lyme Disease, they have collected quite a few infections. These include:
Gastrointestinal Dysbiosis
Yeast Infections
Parasitic Infections
ViraI Infections
Bacterial Co-Infections
Many people who have Lyme Disease often also have environmental toxicity illnesses including:
Heavy metal toxicity
Environmental toxicity
Mold toxicity (some of the sickest patients out there have mold toxicity & Lyme Disease)
The presence of these toxins can further impair the immune system, making individuals more susceptible to the infections listed above. These infections and toxicities can also independently promote inflammation, adding to the high burden of inflammation already created by Lyme Disease in the body.
Trying to treat Lyme Disease before immune suppressive infections or toxins have been addressed can make treatment ineffective and increase inflammation. Recent research suggests that the primary damage from Lyme Disease is not from the infection itself but from the inflammation created by the infection. If this is true, increasing inflammation by treating Lyme before other infections or toxins have been addressed would be counterintuitive. When you kill off any type of infection, including Borrelia, the byproducts of cell death must be detoxified. If the body's detoxification pathways are otherwise occupied by toxins, it can worsen side effects of antimicrobial treatment. Finally, symptoms of heavy metal toxicity, mold toxicity, and some environmental toxicity can mimic Lyme Disease. Treating Lyme Disease without addressing these components may be treating the wrong thing!
Preparing the body by supporting weakened systems and addressing these common comorbid infections and toxicities can increase the success and tolerability of Lyme Disease treatment. The decision of when to treat varies individually and making the decision to treat Borrelia infection before other infections or toxicities may be the best choice in certain cases.
However, here are some general treatment considerations that may help increase the efficacy of a Lyme Disease treatment. They follow a hierarchy of more foundational to more complex, although order can change based on individual patient health concerns:
Evaluate Nutrients: Both Lyme Disease and environmental toxins deplete nutrients. In most patients with chronic illness, both gastrointestinal and cell membrane health are compromised, interfering with nutrient absorption. Although it is unlikely nutrients will reach optimal levels until infectious burden is decreased, supporting nutrients can help biochemical pathways that run daily cell functions run more efficiently, support the immune system, and decrease symptoms of Lyme Disease.
Evaluate Oral Health: Oral health is intimately tied to the health of the rest of your body and the mouth is no
exception to the inflammatory and immune suppressive effects of Lyme Disease. Most concerningly, in individuals with a history of root canal, tooth removal, or oral surgery, deep cavitations can form at the site of the operation. These cavitations can provide a safe space for infections, like Lyme Disease and parasites, to grow. Evaluating cavitations with a biological oral surgeon, using CT scan, and having them surgically cleaned can help flush out hidden sources of Lyme Disease.
Evaluate Gastrointestinal Health: In virtually every chronic illness, there are problems with gastrointestinal health. This is because the gastrointestinal tract is one of the body’s largest sources of exposure to the outside world and is very sensitive to damage. Additionally, the fact that a high percentage of the immune system is located in the gut allows the gut to interact with almost every other system in the body. If health conditions in the gastrointestinal tract are not addressed, inflammation can easily be perpetuated during Lyme treatment and the immune system will not be properly strengthened to fight infection. The gastrointestinal tract is also a major system of detoxification: the liver produces bile which is used to excrete toxins into stool. Toxins are then eliminated from the body with a bowel movement. This detoxification function is essential when treating a chronic infection like Borrelia and its associated co-infections. As infected cells die, they create waste that must be eliminated. If gastrointestinal function is compromised, toxins produced during “die off” can be reabsorbed, instead of eliminated. While complete gastrointestinal healing is unlikely to be achieved in the presence of multiple infections and toxins, improvement of gut health can help increase the effectiveness of treatments.
Treat Parasites: Parasites are ubiquitous. All of us are exposed and nearly all of us contract parasites at some point in
our lives. While they do not cause symptoms for everyone, they can play a large role in preventing patients with Lyme Disease from healing. While parasitic infections occurring with Lyme Disease are not confined to the intestinal tract, intestinal parasites can protect other types of microbes including bacteria, viruses, and Borrelia species. Killing parasites can help flush out hidden sources of Lyme Disease and its related infections. Parasites also shift the immune system toward something called a TH1 response, which decreases its ability to fight viral infections. Because of this, the presence of parasites can make it more difficult to treat these immune suppressing co-infections. Treatment of parasites may be accomplished with herbs and/or pharmaceuticals. Parasites are often protected by biofilms – which are mucoid aggregates of bacteria and toxins – so antiparasitic protocols will likely require the additional therapies to target biofilms. Parasites also often accumulate in the presence of heavy metals so if a high parasite load is present, testing for heavy metals may be helpful.
Treat Yeast: Yeast infections, such as vaginal, gastrointestinal, or oral candidiasis are not present in all patients with Lyme Disease. However, these infections are opportunistic, meaning they grow to problematic levels when the immune system is suppressed, as it is in Lyme Disease. Yeast infections may also occur as a side effect of antibiotics used to treat Lyme Disease. It is also commonly observed with mold toxicity. The presence of candidiasis presents another burden to the immune system that can interfere with the effectiveness of Lyme Disease treatment. If oral antibiotic therapy is being used as the treatment of choice, antifungal preventative therapies should be employed. If candidiasis develops as a side effect of Lyme antibiotic therapy, it should be treated concurrently with Lyme Disease.
Consider Addressing Genetic SNPs impacting inflammation and metabolism: Epigenetic medicine is a core part of my practice because your genetic makeup is what makes you susceptible or resistant to the effects of environmental triggers like infections and toxins. Some individuals naturally create more inflammation and accumulate toxins, due to their individual genetic makeup. To make this situation worse, Lyme Disease inhibits many of the biochemical pathways that clear inflammation and toxins. While not a core component of healing Lyme Disease, running a comprehensive genetic panel can help identify therapeutic targets for lowering baseline inflammation, help reduce symptom flares, and support the body to heal more efficiently at a cellular level.
Evaluate & Treat Heavy Metals: Heavy metals should be tested for in all Lyme Disease patients, as these individuals have weakened immune systems and naturally impaired detoxification systems. Heavy metals can attract parasites, which protect Lyme Disease, and help form biofilms, which make Lyme Disease more resistant to treatment. Like Lyme Disease, heavy metals create inflammation, neurological disruption, autoimmunity, and chronic fatigue in the body. In fact, the symptoms of heavy metal toxicity mimic those of Lyme Disease. Treating heavy metals is an important component of treating Lyme Disease because not only can the presence of heavy metals worsen Lyme Disease symptoms, treating heavy metals may reduce symptoms previously credited to Lyme Disease. Treatment of heavy metals can also help detoxification pathways function more efficiently and nutrient levels stabilize.
Evaluate & Treat Environmental Toxins: Testing for and treating environmental toxins should be performed on an individual basis that accounts for patient symptoms, history of exposure, and total toxic burden. Most environmental toxins are neurotoxins and may create symptoms that overlap with the neurological symptoms and fatigue observed in Lyme Disease.
Test for & Treat Mold: Perhaps one of the only chronic illnesses with the ability to create symptoms equal to or
worse than Lyme Disease is chronic inflammatory response to mold toxicity. Both activate similar cytokines and overlapping genetics, associated with widespread inflammation. Both have far reaching impacts on the body through their inflammatory nature, their disruption of gastrointestinal function, and their interference with detoxification pathways. Both also create severe neurological inflammation.
For some individuals, the elimination of mold toxins, reduction of associated inflammation, and strengthening of damaged systems alleviates mold related illness. In other susceptible individuals, it creates something called Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS) in which a specific set of immune markers is activated. CIRS requires extensive treatment to reverse.
Most doctors recommend treating mold illness before Lyme.
Disease, as mold illness may be more severe and this course of action can make Lyme treatment more effective. However, in some cases it may be necessary to treat both Lyme and mold at the same time.
Consider treatment of Co-Infections & Viruses: Infections with any Borrelia species almost never occur in isolation. This is not only because Lyme Disease inhibits the immune system, increasing infectious susceptibility, but also because tics infected with Borrelia are often infected with other infections. These infections are transmitted with the Borrelia following a tick bite. Some infectious disease researchers are beginning to suspect that Borrelia itself carries other infections in its gut, which it regurgitates into its host. The presence of these infections can make Lyme Disease more difficult to treat. However, I have also seen in my clinical practice, that the presence of Lyme Disease can also make these infections more difficult to eradicate. Because of this, the decision regarding whether to treat co-infections prior to Lyme Disease treatment or concurrently with it is made on an individual basis.
Address Biofilms: According to the National Institute of Health, biofilms are responsible for more than 80% of
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