Ask the Acupuncturist

I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease and my husband has several friends at work with family members that have Lyme as well.  He has heard from them that you cannot get rid of Lyme unless you take antibiotics.  He wanted to know if you had any testimonials from other Lyme patients, or that we could contact to get feedback from them.  Since I will be flying in once a month, my husband wants to make sure this is something that will work for me.
Thank you,
Sarah

Sarah,
There is no definite test to prove that Lyme is cured or eradicated.   There are only inferential tests that when used in conjunction, give relative assurances that the Lyme is either eradicated or is not active.  The most common test, the Western Blot, gives false negatives about 2/3rds of the time.  Because of this uncertainty, I would never say that a patient has been “cured”.  I could only say that they have been symptom free or that their tests have been negative for a certain period of time.  There are actually several different forms of “Lyme” disease other than the common species of Borrelia burg. that are almost never tested for.

There is actually no 100% conclusive proof that antibiotics kill chronic Lyme disease.  A clinical determination or diagnosis can be made, but not 100% positive biomedical certainty.  A typical course of antibiotic therapy will last well over a year, indicating the difficulty of the organism.

The same is true with other than antibiotic approaches. Dr. Weil has some good information about herbal approaches to Lyme treatment on his website.  He refers to the Zhang family in New York who have teated several thousand Lyme cases with Chinese Medicine.  They have written the definitive book on the treatment of Lyme disease with Chinese Medicine.  The protocols that I was using were similar to Dr. Zhang’s before I read his book and are now nearly identical.  If you are on the East Coast I would recommend seeing the Zhang’s.  The Zhangs, Dr. Weil, and many others, believe that the antibiotic approach has about as many negatives as positives.  I have seen many Lyme patients who have done several years of antibiotic therapy and have experienced very poor results and have had their conditions worsen dramatically.

I am seeing one gentleman in the next couple of weeks who we believe is now Lyme free.  Again, there is no way to have absolute biomedical certainty.  I will ask if he is willing to make contact with you.

I have another young man doing combination antibiotics and Chinese medicine who is now having good CD57 counts in a remarkably short period of time.  I can also ask him when I see him.  I just started treating his girlfriend, as she was recently diagnosed with Lyme.  Her MD feels that she contracted the Lyme directly from him and not from an arthropod vector.

By the way, even if antibiotics are the primary treatment of choice, I am quite certain that Lyme and other “Gu” diseases are treated much more effectively if Chinese Medicine is used as an adjunctive treatment.  It might be helpful to listen to the radio program that I did on “Gu disease”.  This can be found on: www.thebalancingpoint.net.

In this podcast I explain why Chinese herbals are so effective and have been used for several thousand years to treat these disorders.  The earliest confirmed case of Lyme disease that I am aware of is from about 6,000 years ago.  The character for “Gu” disorders has been in the Chinese language for about 3,500 years.

Be Happy!
John Nieters, DAOM, L.Ac.
Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine