Lyme
“For all those people whose doctors told them it’s all in their head.”
—Stephen Harrod Buhner
And thus begins master herbalist Stephen Buhner’s book Healing Lyme; the second book of his that profoundly changed my life. His first book I read was The Lost Language of Plants. I was 21 years old and had just begun to realize that something might be wrong with everything I thought I knew about... everything. In Lost Language I experienced what has been referred to as a “pharmaceutical Silent Spring” in which I learned that the very drugs that had been meant to help me had for many years been slowly killing not just me but also the entire global ecosystem I never even knew I was a part of.
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely already been to many other specialists and have experienced a lot of shoulder shrugging, eye rolling, long-term antibiotic regimens, and maybe even psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Well, now you’re here. I believe you when you tell me your body hurts from your skin down into your bones. I believe you when you say you’ve had inexplicable brain fog for 15 years. I believe you when you say you’ve had negative tests but you’re still sick. I believe it all because people I care about have been in your shoes and I’ve learned that people aren’t making any of this up.
Lyme—and all other modern chronic inflammatory diseases—are very real and require dedication, patience, perseverance, and frankly a good bit of mental & emotional reckoning. In a way, chronic inflammatory disease is an offering to help truly find yourself. When you see parts of your life die before your very eyes, you become alive in whole new ways as you go through the healing process. You’ll learn through this process how to take care of and truly love yourself. It isn’t always fun or easy and you won’t be the same person on the other side. But someday, if we stick through this thing, you’ll look yourself in the mirror and see a version of yourself that is not just full of love but also quite a hero in the archetypal sense... you made it through the minotaur’s labyrinth, finding your way through what seemed like an incomprehensible series of obstacles and ultimately defeating a monster guarding a treasure.
There is, however, a glaring hidden truth about this mythical metaphor for the journey through Lyme and other modern chronic inflammatory diseases. This truth is that the monster isn’t Borrelia burgdorferi, or Babesia microti, or Bartonella henselae. The monster is every bit of technotopian chimera that has occurred since before you were even conceived that has separated you from nature and your rightful position of health and prosperity upon this planet. It was the technological program of separation and dominance that led us to overuse antibiotics, eat factory foods, rampantly pollute our own water & air, and think of ourselves as somehow foreign from the very Earth that birthed us. It was this ecological rift that weakened our immune systems enough to allow chronic inflammatory diseases such as Lyme to happen in the first place.
While Lyme disease entails pathogens that create cytokine cascades that break down collagen in your muscles and myelin in your nervous system to eat as food and this to me feels like microscopic evil incarnate, I would still venture to say that ticks aren’t inherently bad, and neither are the parasites they harbor. They carry an ecological biofeedback message for us letting us know that we have strayed too far, and it is time to come home. This message is getting louder and louder as our health further deteriorates. The United States—the country most developed and separate from nature in the world—can now boast an adult chronic disease rate of 60% (CDC, 2022). This means the majority of adults you see at the grocery store this week will be walking the aisles with an underlying chronic disease.
How on Earth did we get here? For starters, our diets have been toxic for at least the past 3 generations. Let’s take myself as an example since I grew up with a somewhat average American life in the 1980s. While my parents valued health and we rarely had items like soda in our house, I still—just like every other American—ate a diet laced with glyphosate day in and day out. We ate cereal for breakfast, public school lunch (frozen pizza or PB&J on white bread), and luckily some sort of balanced dinner, albeit with ingredients likely grown with toxic practices. The “healthy” skim milk we drank was depleted of nutrients and full of antibiotics and added sugars. The “healthy” margarine we ate was an undigestible industrial byproduct. Fat was seen as an enemy and high fructose corn syrup was in just about everything. My tonsils & adenoids were removed at 11 after a minor sore throat. These lymphatic organs are essential parts of the immune system guarding the very place foreign liquids and solids enter the body. Cut out, thrown away. I was given many dozens of courses of antibiotics before my 18th birthday. When I felt sad at 19, I was given Lithium.
When I was anxious about where I was going in life at 20, Clonazepam. By the time I turned 21, I had been so medicated and given so much misinformation, I had no idea who I even was, and I felt like absolute garbage. By the time I was 26 my poor intestines were in such bad shape that I had to have a section removed just to stay alive. While this surgery saved my life and I’m grateful for the miracles of modern acute emergency medical procedures, we systemically over-medicate and over-operate, destroying our natural immune systems. This, all at the hands of the most advanced medicine the world has ever seen.
We have created a pipeline for chronic inflammatory disease. And if you are reading this right now, you are one of the canaries in the coal mine. Unlike the canary though, you can recover from this. My Lyme patients are routinely the strongest and most dynamic who walk through my door. They leave me inspired and grateful for every day I have without the myriad of terrible feelings they suffer through daily. They tell me stories that leave me, literally, awestruck. The Universe has a way of choosing people to be harbingers who are strong enough to handle it.
My philosophy on healing is that generally people get a handful of miracle healings (that they know of), and then the rest is a slow steady push toward regenerating health. I’m not sure why it’s like this but that’s just been my clinical experience. Lyme is the epitome of the slow steady push. The first step is deciding with every fiber of your being that you want to live a full, integrated, and vibrant life. The integration part is key as you are rejoining the ecosystem that is Earth. This can be especially hard for Lyme patients as it often feels like Earth is what made them sick in the first place. My view, however, is that separation from Earth made us sick in the first place.
Bringing it back to Stephen Harrod Buhner, I would highly recommend reading his groundbreaking book, The Lost Language of Plants, to get a better understanding of how our divergence from being part of our ecosystem has led to our rise in chronic inflammatory disease. Buhner sees us as integral parts of our planet and uses the plants given to us to heal Lyme:
1. The first step Buhner takes is to protect the endothelial structures that line your lymphatic and blood vasculature. To do this he uses Hu Zhang (Polygonum cuspidatum), an herb we use in Chinese medicine to invigorate blood, dispel stagnate blood, unblock channels, stop pain, clear heat, discharge toxins, and disperse swelling (Bensky, 2015). This herb strengthens the walls of the “highways” that pathogens use throughout your body and keeps them from escaping and going deeper. If pathogens can be kept within the vessels, they can be dealt with by the body’s innate processes of detoxification and elimination. By clearing heat and stopping swelling and pain, it also addresses many of the painful symptoms of Lyme (Buhner, 2015).
2. Step two is to use Huang Qin (Scutellaria bacalensis) and Dan Shen (Salvia miltiorrhiza) to remodulate your cytokines to stop the cascade that pathogens have initiated. These herbs cool the blood, detoxify, and help with irritability (Bensky, 2015). They are anti-inflammatory and are inherently anti-spirochetal by blocking the way Lyme pathogens feed and reproduce (Buhner, 2015).
3. Step three is to restore your collagenous structures using Ge Gen (Pueria lobata). Spirochetes break down tissues to create food for themselves. These tissues can be musculature, resulting in body pain. They can also be myelin, resulting in nerve pain and brain fog (Buhner, 2015). Ge Gen also generates fluids, clears heat, and alleviates symptoms of hypertension (Bensky, 2015).
4. Step four is immune remodulation and support with Huang Qi (Astragalus). This is a famous Chinese herb for strengthening the body’s vital energies, fluids, and immune system (Bensky, 2015). This herb can also be used as a protective measure to protect your system from Lyme pathogens and seasonal colds & flus (Buhner, 2015).
5. Step five is to restore damaged neural structures with Gou Teng (Uncaria rhynchophylla). Many Lyme patients suffer a significant amount of neural damage through loss of myelin. Gou Teng is a balm for the nervous system and fosters neuro-regeneration (Buhner, 2015).
6. Step six is symptom treatment. This could be anything from treating pain with Yan Hu Suo (Cordyalis) to treating emotional stress & deficiency with a complete formula such as Xiao Yao San or even something as simple as good old lavender oil (Buhner, 2015).
7. Finally, step seven is killing parasites. There are many herbs to choose from to do this and the best one for spirochetes such as Borrelia has so far been Chuan Xin Lian (Andrographis). This herb is also used on fresh tick bites as a tincture mixed with bentonite clay (Buhner, 2015). There are many other herbs that kill parasites, and the best approach is usually to use a combination of medium doses instead of a single high dose of one.
In addition to addressing biological parasites themselves, a brilliant doctor of Chinese medicine named Heiner Freuhauf uses plant medicine to also address the concept of “parasitic toxins.” Parasitic toxins could be thought of as a dark and insidious energetic pattern that inhabits the body along with the parasites. They have a special name in Chinese: “gu.” Gu means “parasite” or “demon,” depending on who you talk to. The idea is that people get invaded by this invisible presence that takes over their lives. Patients report that they, “aren’t themselves,” or that they, “want their life back.” Essentially this Gu Syndrome is treated as a sort of possession that has taken over someone’s entire being. Sounds like Lyme, right? These types of chronic parasitic infections, however, are as old as time. Plant medicine healers have been treating them for thousands of years.
This practice of treating Gu Syndrome was highly regarded in China until the 1950’s when it was essentially scrubbed from official doctrine of Traditional Chinese Medicine. TCM is the most prolific branch of East Asian Medicine and what nearly all acupuncturists in the U.S. are trained in today. The idea that patients were being infected with some nebulous unidentifiable presence that was affecting them physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually was just too much for the political figures that standardized and proliferated TCM to the western world during the 1950s. So just like western medicine, TCM also once proclaimed about Lyme-like chronic inflammatory diseases: this doesn’t exist.
Fortunately, Dr. Freuhauf has been an early innovator of successful herbal treatment of Lyme using ancient concepts of Gu Syndrome. He looks at Lyme disease the same way practitioners did for thousands of years in China in that essentially people with Lyme had a deficiency that created an opportunity for a parasite to enter and take over. This is called “xuxie zeifang,” meaning “deficiency-based opportunistic wind.” “Wind” is the movement of pathogens into and throughout the body.
Freuhauf has his own hierarchy of diagnostic and treatment principles. Regarding diagnosis, he says: “If you have body pain accompanied by mysterious neurological symptoms, plus wildly fluctuating mental-emotional symptoms, plus one or more digestive symptoms, plus indications of autoimmune activity, you’ve got Lyme—don’t wait for some test to confirm that.” The good doctor doesn’t waste any time! His treatment principles then are to disperse parasitic toxins, kill parasites, calm the spirit, and strengthen and invigorate vital energies & fluids.
With these principles in mind Freuhauf has carefully crafted two main formulas that treat Lyme: Thunder Pearls and Lightning Pearls. These formulas are both based on a Qing Dynasty a formula called Su He Tang (Perilla and Mentha Decoction) that was created by a doctor named Lu Shunde. Thunder and Lightning Pearls are cycled by Dr. Freuhauf based on the pulse quality of patients, usually on a 4–6-week rotation period. When patients are having more digestive issues, the focus will be on Thunder Pearls. With neurological and musculature issues, the focus is on Lightning Pearls. As your symptoms progress and your pulse quality changes, your herbal formula is cycled. This is in alignment with the theory of keeping parasites unable to adapt to the herbal formula because of the constant change.
Buhner and Freuhauf are both genius herbalists. Their theoretical approaches to Lyme are similar except one major difference: temperature. Buhner’s herbs will have a cooling effect, whereas Freuhauf’s will generally warm the body. The key here is then integration. Buhner’s protocol is working for thousands of patients and so is Freuhauf’s. Lyme patients are often literally and metaphorically cold from the mental, emotional, and physical depression they experience. The antibiotics they’ve taken additionally typically have a chilling effect on the body. But if you talk to them, they often feel a burning sensation deep inside or experience bouts of “hot” emotions. It’s a mixed pattern.
These herbal treatments can be supplemented with a selection of adjunctive treatments such as regular acupuncture, moxibustion, tui na (medical massage), liniments, fire cupping, gua sha, PEMF therapy, Daoist healing practices, bee venom therapy, infrared therapy, ionic “Earthing” practices, breathwork, coffee enemas, ION gut healing, ozone therapy, stone medicine, helpful foods, modern nutritional supplements, lots of clean water, and anything else that you feel is right. There is no one size fits all for Lyme treatments and the best person to decide what’s going to work is going to be you. Various practitioners of natural healing modalities can help, a lot. But really who you need is need you. The people who are working on your team can be seen as corner people who have neat healing techniques and know acupuncture, herbal medicine, medical massage, and a whole lot of other cool modalities that are going to make you feel a lot better along the way as you regain your rightful place of health & wellness within this ecosystem that we call Earth.
See you at your next appointment.
—Jaime