Using Bee Stings to Treat Lyme Disease | Hacker News Reader

Using Bee Stings to Treat Lyme Disease

texasmonthly.com

105 pointsmerrier78 comments

The only two relevant paragraphs in the article:

> In the years that followed, an increasing number of Lyme sufferers started using Lobel’s technique, with good outcomes. Not only did they say they felt better, they said that it saved their lives. Wanting to combine Lobel’s protocol with a more holistic approach, Dolan started a Facebook group of her own called “Healing Lyme With Bee Venom,” where more than 5,500 members post their questions and testimonials. “Year 1 was rough on my husband,” wrote the spouse of one Lyme sufferer who used the bee therapy. “Yesterday he walked seven miles hiking thru a state park.” “I was bedridden when I first started and I more or less lead a normal life now,” said another group member.

> It is possible—some would say probable—that these individuals are promoting a technique whose success is based more on psychology than pharmacology. There is little science to substantiate a cure by stinging. There have been two clinical studies investigating the link between bee venom and Lyme, and though they are compelling, they are confined to petri dishes. A 1997 study and a 2017 study showed the interaction of bee venom’s primary component, melittin, and the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi. Melittin, which is a helical peptide consisting of 26 amino acids, tends to bore a hole in the outer membrane of the larger, spiral-shaped Borrelia burgdorferi, releasing the inner contents of the bacteria just as a corkscrew would slice open a water balloon.

Dunno if this could be probiotics or it could be quack science. I think it's important that it warrants investigation (a double-blind RCT) - I always harbored hope that experiment.com could be able to create crowd-funded research for populations who are going to great lengths and using lots of resources for these cures.

Also, you're forgetting about the two following paragraphs after your quotes (which I just think is interesting to test in general):

> Perhaps, instead of destroying the bacteria directly, the venom’s effect is indirect, kick-starting the immune system. Bee venom studies have shown promise in combating symptoms for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. According to Justin Schmidt, an insect venom expert at the Southwestern Biological Institute, in Tucson, it’s possible that when the immune system begins attacking itself, an injection of bee venom may help by providing an alternate target—“something to chew on,” he said, “and this tends to regulate the immune system so it does what it’s supposed to be doing, which is attack toxins that are getting into your body.” While Lyme is a bacterial infection, it sometimes mimics autoimmune disorders, and so maybe, somehow, similar rules apply.

> It’s also possible that the pain of the stings plays a role. “Maybe the venom is doing something to kick off pain receptors,” he said. Anecdotal evidence suggests that other types of venom may also work this way. A brief article in the Lancet, from 1983, described a 43-year-old woman in Arizona who had MS and went into remission for two months following a scorpion sting on her right foot. An immunologist in Houston told me she was contacted by a physician experiencing progressive MS who said he’d been stung by a sea anemone and went into temporary remission.

One theory is that bee venom triggers an immune response in the stinged area, accelerating any needed “repairs”.

Weird thing: my dad got into beekeeping. He takes an occasional sting, but he says while the sting is temporary, it relieves some of his arthritis in joints near the sting.

This is well known among beekeepers (my dad is one).

I spent some time in the Lyme disease communities after I tested positive for Lyme disease under the official two-test CDC criteria. The pop-culture version of Lyme disease discussed on the Internet has almost no resemblance to the actual medical science. There are a lot of people genuinely suffering unexplained symptoms, real pain, who are drawn into the seductive explanations of the “chronic Lyme” communities online.

Quackery like this is commonplace. Usually there’s a thread of potential science buried somewhere in the treatments, like the idea of bee stings triggering a beneficial immune response. However, the common theme is always a complete lack of actual research and total hit or miss response rate among people who try these experiments on themselves.

One common theme in the chronic Lyme communities is that people who go into remission tend to attribute their response to whatever technique, supplement, or medication they were trying at the time. These people are desperate for relief, so they’re often cycling through 10s of supplements or quack treatments at a time. If they spontaneously go into remission, they’ll swear it was due to the supplements. Yet others fail to have the same success with the same supplements. You end up with long lists of “things that might help” according to anecdotal reports, and the desperate sufferers start trying them one by one until something changes. When they exhaust the basic supplements they move on to more exotic treatments like bee stings.

The sad part is that these people really are suffering, but they’ve become so militantly attached to the disproven chronic Lyme infection hypothesis that they’re stuck in a research wasteland. Self-diagnosed Chronic Lyme patients have gone so far as to harass researchers who publish results that disagree with their theories. It’s such a delicate topic that researchers and doctors don’t even want to touch the subject these days. It took me 2 weeks of calling infectious disease specialists and screening my positive test results before someone would let me step foot in their office. Apparently they’re buried under self-diagnosed “chronic Lyme” patients who order questionable self tests on the Internet.

As for Lyme disease: The actual infection can be treated with a standard course of antibiotics. The infection does not persist indefinitely, although some people experience long-lasting effects after the infection is gone. This is what “chronic Lyme” refers to, assuming the patients had legitimate infections in the first place. Many of these patients are self-diagnosing based on vague symptoms alone, or ordering quack tests from Lyme labs that will give anyone a positive result as long as they’re willing to pay for it.

“chronic Lyme” is probably something, just probably not literally 'chronic Lyme'. The problem is, if you think you know the cause you'll stop looking for the actual cause.

Sometimes what a person calls “chronic Lyme” isn’t actually anything, at least not anything pathological. I have very noticeable eye floaters (which any doctor will tell you are completely benign debris in the eye’s vitreous) and I have occasionally done a web search to learn more about how they arise, what they really look like, etc. But web searches for eye floaters these days tend to bring up a lot of people claiming that eye floaters are Lyme bacteria, or whatever, and having them is a sign of “chronic Lyme”.

In one forum thread I stumbled upon in the self-diagnosed “chronic Lyme“ community, people were claiming that eye floaters are "morgellons", i.e. the person must have chronic Lyme which in turn led to Morgellons syndrome. It was both of the imaginary diseases of the new millennium combined into one superstition!

You'll also see people touting gluten-free diets to help the symptoms of "Chronic Lyme Disease" and the theory that "Chronic Lyme Disease" causes "Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" (google it for mind-numbing websites).

> There are a lot of people genuinely suffering unexplained symptoms, real pain, who are drawn into the seductive explanations of the “chronic Lyme” communities online.

However, some of this is the fault of the modern medical establishment who want to stop looking and treating at 6-12 months if you don't have something mainstream diagnosable. And "Lyme" was the medical establishment dumping ground for a lot of those people--the modern equivalent to "hysteria".

In addition, modern medicine is finding that there are physiological after effects to lots of diseases even once the primary disease is cured. This is unsurprising (look at the aftereffects of polio and rubella, for example), but doesn't really seem to get discussed much since medicine can't really do anything if a virus damages nerves, for example.

(As someone who had to have his gallbladder removed, this infuriated me. I couldn't get anyone to give me any treatment for gallstones other waiting to remove my gallbladder. And, once it was removed, any digestive complications afterward were just "sucks to be you". Um, sure, the alternative was death, but is it really a "treatment" if a significant chunk of people have negative lifestyle implications afterward? And why aren't we looking for a better actual treatment? Preferably one that doesn't involve ripping out body chunks?)

However, blowing off a significant subset of people who have real symptoms is part of the reason why alternative medicine continues to have such a following in spite of the fact that it doesn't actually work.

I have a friend who had his out and is in that roughly one-in-ten group of people who have to stick pretty close to a restroom, even years later. Due to that, when I landed in the hospital due to an infected and unhappy gallbladder, I decided against removal for myself and spent some time digging up actual studies on how to dissolve the gallstones. After all, I could always have it cut out later. Brought a treatment regimen and highlights of the primary sources to my physician, who gave me the green light for a course of treatment.

About a year after, I had to see a different physician for insurance purposes. He mentioned that he had, in twenty-eight years of practice, never seen anyone who had gone ahead and spent the time trying to dissolve the stones. I suspect, because removal is the "tonsillectomy of abdominal surgeries," they just all default to yanking it out.

> Due to that, when I landed in the hospital due to an infected and unhappy gallbladder, I decided against removal for myself and spent some time digging up actual studies on how to dissolve the gallstones.

Unfortunately, my gallbladder was at the "104 fever and hydromorphone for pain" level when I landed in the emergency room--choices weren't on the table at that point.

I had been watching my gallbladder for years and I absolutely couldn't pry ursodeoxycholic acid out of any of my doctors as my gallstones "weren't that big". No, they didn't LOOK that big on ultrasound--when my gallbladder was removed they were more than an inch across.

Part of the problem with the modern medical establishment is that anything with a component of more than twice a day or longer than 3 months has an abysmal compliance rate and so they won't give those treatments to anybody--even someone who can demonstrate that they can follow a disciplined schedule for years. And a gallstone treatment regimen takes 12 months before you can even start to see a change.

That's about where I was when I got there. I ended up with six dosages of hydromorphone and had a similar temperature, plus a blood pressure that had soared past 200-something. It was not a fun time.

I think I lucked out in that everything calmed down as soon as the infection was knocked on a bit. That and my doctor was understanding, but I had located an overseas source of Ursodiol if he wouldn't come through.

I've been getting periodic ultrasounds and also some enzyme level checks.

I agree: even the establishment is looking for either a quick fix or a lifetime prescription, but almost nothing between the two extremes. Either, I think, require as little physical time as you can get away with, it's the middle course that is tedious for them.

> As for Lyme disease: The actual infection can be treated with a standard course of antibiotics. The infection does not persist indefinitely, although some people experience long-lasting effects after the infection is gone.

I don't think it's possible to make an absolute statement like this with 100% certainty given the current state of the art. Lyme is a spirochete, and there also seems to be real research suggesting it can grow biofilm to make it antibiotic resistant or resurgent.

There are patients who test positive under CDC criteria, take antibiotics, and never see a transition from IgM to IgG.

There are also patients who test postive under CDC criteria, take antibiotics, see a transition, but still experience symptoms (what you would call 'long-lasting effects'). In some cases patients in that situation have extreme gland swelling that when biopsied, seem to contain Lyme.

Like all of medicine, I think it's squishier than what you're describing. There is also a lot of crazy shit on the internet, but like you say, that's because people are genuinely suffering and have no alternatives.

> I don't think it's possible to make an absolute statement like this with 100% certainty

100% certainty is an impossibly high bar in any hard science

This is the problem with chronic Lyme communities: They fixate on the "what if", no matter how small the probabilities. Many of these patients might very well have entirely treatable yet unrelated disorders, but their fixation on the chronic lyme infection theories keeps them focused on the wrong treatments. Many doctors have tried endless treatments with high-dose antibiotics, but the clinical studies consistently show no difference vs. placebo. We all need to move on from the chronic lyme infection theory unless/until someone provides real evidence to the contrary.

> There are patients who test positive under CDC criteria, take antibiotics, and never see a transition from IgM to IgG.

That was me. I tested positive under the CDC criteria, but followup IgG tests were negative. I lucked into a very astute infectious disease specialist who was as up-to-date on the research as I could have hoped for, and she even took the time to walk me through the various theories and studies.

There only have been a couple antibiotic studies, it's hard to get funding for more elaborate studies because of the controversy. Those studies ignore the research on biofilms and only gave antibiotics for a couple weeks. And even in those flawed studies there was a marked improvement in quality of life for Lyme patients.

Let's take the PLEASE[0] study for example. Although significant improvement in health was measured (on average 4.6 points on the SF-36 scale; 3 points is considered significant progress) the results were presented with the headline: 'Long-term use of antibiotics does not benefit long-term complaints of Lyme'.

While tens of thousands of patients have been cured by a cocktail of antibiotics taken for several months or sometimes years. This is also what the current in vitro research is showing. Lyme persisters can only be killed by a combination of antibiotics.[1] Like tuberculosis. And it's also what this data analysis of 200 patients shows.[2]

>We collected data from an online survey of 200 of our patients, which evaluated the efficacy of dapsone (diaminodiphenyl sulfone, ie, DDS) combined with other antibiotics and agents that disrupt biofilms for the treatment of chronic Lyme disease/post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS). ... Conclusion DDS CT decreased eight major Lyme symptoms severity and improved treatment outcomes among patients with chronic Lyme disease/PTLDS and associated coinfections.

And recently we have the spectacular results of Disulfiram.[3] A clinical trial is underway at Colombia University so we won't have offical results until 2021 but all signs point to it being a gamechanger. Lyme communities are full of people with miracle stories after taking Disulfiram.

[0]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1505425

[1]https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2019/three-antibiot...

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6388746/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31151194

> This is the problem with chronic Lyme communities: They fixate on the "what if", no matter how small the probabilities.

The chronic lyme people (e.g. ILADS) are often making recommendations that aren't based on solid evidence, but the reason they exist in the first place is because the CDC recommendations are also bullshit and the CDC isn't doing nearly enough to stem the epidemic.

Did you continue to rest positive for IgM? Did you eventually identify an actual cause?

> when biopsied, seem to contain Lyme.

What's this a reference to? And what do you mean by "seem" to contain Lyme Disease?

Biofilms and persister cells are the problem with chronic Lyme disease.

https://rawlsmd.com/health-articles/understanding-biofilm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6287027/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6521364/

It's pretty simple, if the disease is able to enter the form where it starts producing biofilms it can use them to evade antibiotics. A patient then must explore treatments to break up biofilms, and eradicate whatever infections or co-infections are present within them. There's medications that do this and more functional methods such as hyperbaric oxygen chambers.

The people who have symptoms after antibiotic treatment and the people who relapse after antibiotic treatment still likely contain Lyme disease biofilms and persister cells which are capable of causing a full relapse given enough time and the right conditions.

Those who receive early treatment and success with a single round of antibiotics are the lucky ones, and not the standard patient experience.

Even people who have been bitten by a tick, immediately started antibiotics, and caught it immediately can still get chronic Lyme disease, especially if their initial round of antibiotics was for too short a duration.

There is a lot of shit on the Internet, and what's happening to the people who have Lyme disease is an absolute travesty and crime against humanity due to our corrupt and failing medical system. The actually science and research on this is clear though: biofilms exist, Lyme disease can become chronic due to biofilms and persister cells which can evade antibiotics.

Everyone talks about how theres super bugs and infections that evade antibiotics, well Lyme disease is literally a super bug that evades antibiotics and is probably one of the most successful super bugs of our lifetimes and yet people try to deny its capabilities despite countless medical research studies proving otherwise. It's baffling really.

To add: there’s also a cystic form of Borrelia burgdorferi.

The bacteria is a spirochete, similar to the bacteria responsible for Syphilis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564911/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrelia_burgdorferi

Are there phage therapy options for persistant lyme disease? Lyme disease is caused by the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi. A quick pubmed search ([1],[2]) turned up two papers describing phage that interact with Borrelia.

Neither discussed their suitability for phage therapy. The most recent investigated phages as a potential mechanism for horizontal gene transfer b/w Borrelia burgdorferi: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27811049

More searching led me to a page titled "Chronic Lime Disease" at the "Phage Therapy Center": https://www.phagetherapycenter.com/pii/PatientServlet?comman...

They seem to have developed phages for clinical treatment of chronic infections (perhaps biofilm mediated) of typical pathogens, and suggest that patients suffering from chronic lyme disease may actually be testing false-positive for Borrelia, and if so, may actually be suffering from chronic biofilm-mediated infection of a more common pathogen. In their words:

>>>> quote <<<<

Sometimes patients who have a legitimate, or otherwise, diagnosis of Chronic Lyme Disease, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue are actually suffering from a toxin overload that is produced by a particular strain of bacteria. By clearing the treatable bacterial infections and utilizing various techniques to help reduce the toxin loads, there can be much improvement in the patient's overall condition.

Patients who have or who have had Lyme and Lyme co-infections may have serious damage to their immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection. Chronic infections are biofilms, they are colonies of a number of bacteria that together form colonies in various parts of the body - the sinuses, urinary tract, prostate and elsewhere that are inherently more resistant to antibiotics. While in-vitro lab tests may show sensitivity to various antibacterials, such infections typically do not respond to antibiotics. Dr. Tim Lu (MIT), a professor at MIT, explains why biofilms are antibiotic resistant, and why bacteriophage therapy can be effective:

"A classic example of a patient who had a Western Blot test that detected antibodies for Borrelia bergdorferi: Laura Roberts nearly died from her "non-Lyme co-infection", due to a deadly strain of MRSA which was detected by the lab. There are other similar cases." - Dr. Tim Lu - Biofilms and Phage Therapy

To reiterate, if your infection is a biofilm containing Borrelia or any of the Lyme co-infections, phage therapy from our clinic is NOT going to help you. If the infection is caused by one of the treatable genuses (Staphylococcus spp., Streptococcus spp., Enterococcus spp., E. coli, Proteus spp., Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella spp., Shigella spp., Clostridium difficile (C.Diff), Klebsiella spp., Morganella spp. and several others) there is a good chance we can - but NO GUARANTEE. You will need to test for the presence of these treatable pathogens and even if they are cleared, sometimes symptoms will persist.

>>>>> endquote <<<<<

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22Borrelia%22%5BM...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22Borrelia%2Fvirol...

My aunt was sure she had chronic lyme. She used a couple of years of her life fighting her physician over it. Trying to get him to accept it.

Turned out it was lung cancer. When it was diagnosed correctly, it had turn metastatic and spread to most of her organs including the brain. It went really fast from there. I don't know how it could have turned out. But I'm certain that she would have had more of a chance, if she hadn't interpreted her symptoms through the distorted information she got online.

> But I'm certain that she would have had more of a chance, if she hadn't interpreted her symptoms through the distorted information she got online.

I hesitate to post because it feels callous, but it doesn't sound like her physician did a good job either? Unless she was fighting his attempts to diagnose cancer with her own attempts to self-diagnose Lyme, it seems like neither did any good.

Your post feels callous to me too. The point of my post was that chronic lyme fearmongering made their relationship dysfunctional. Delaying proper diagnosis and treatment.

It goes without saying that a physician overlooking cancer for years isn't doing a great job - by definition. But they are not miracle workers, and it's tough to help someone working against you.

> These people are desperate for relief, so they’re often cycling through 10s of supplements or quack treatments at a time. If they spontaneously go into remission, they’ll swear it was due to the supplements.

Can you blame them for trying to help themselves? I don't think any of them claim to be conducting scientific studies.

If I ever have a condition that medical science can't explain or treat, I might find myself clutching similar quack remedies myself, despite all my vaunted rationality.

>Can you blame them for trying to help themselves?

I don't blame them for trying to find a remedy, I do blame those that take advantage of that.

During a panel at this years LymeMIND conference a representative from the CDC named Susanna Visser said that she and her team absolutely believe in persistent Lyme, and that the CDC website now acknowledges it on a basic level.

>Why some patients experience PTLDS is not known. Some experts believe that Borrelia burgdorferi can trigger an “auto-immune” response causing symptoms that last well after the infection itself is gone. Auto–immune responses are known to occur following other infections, including campylobacter (Guillain-Barré syndrome), chlamydia (Reiter’s syndrome), and strep throat (rheumatic heart disease). Other experts hypothesize that PTLDS results from a persistent but difficult to detect infection. Finally, some believe that the symptoms of PTLDS are due to other causes unrelated to the patient’s Borrelia burgdorferi infection.

"Other experts hypothesize that PTLDS results from a persistent but difficult to detect infection." https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/postlds/index.html

> ...a representative from the CDC named Susanna Visser said that she and her team absolutely believe in persistent Lyme...

I see references to this online but they're all hearsay. I'd like to see a direct reference. The closest I can find is a quote from her in an article in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/life-wi...) but it does not state an absolute belief in persistent Lyme.

The CDC has denied the existence of persistent Lyme for years. They fact that they are now mentioning it as one possible theory is significant in itself.

The old page from last year https://web.archive.org/web/20180921231605/https://www.cdc.g...

Somewhat diverging from the topic, but I wonder how many “chronic Lyme” cases people self-diagnose are instances of parvovirus B19. I'm in the process of recovering from a B19 infection now, but had my kids not gotten it first and displayed the classic slapped-face rash of parvo, I would have almost certainly gone down the Lyme rabbit hole based on the signs and symptoms I've been experiencing. The spontaneous appearance of rheumatoid arthritis that lingers for weeks immediately brings to mind the colloquial notion of Lyme disease.

I had a look at the Wikipedia page for parvovirus B19, but I don't see many similarities to what chronic Lyme sufferers say; they generally complain of chronic pain that lasts for several months or years, not just weeks. Lyme sufferers also generally claim to have been bitten by a tick, and had them characteristic target rash, rather than a "slapped face" rash.

Honestly not sure what would make you think "Lyme" with the symptoms you describe.

I believe the idea is that once the rheumatoid arthritis pops up suddenly and lasts for weeks, it's easy to jump to a conclusion it could be the beginning of the chronic pain from Lyme disease, and that you just didn't find the tick, etc.

Nice post. One thing I’ll offer in defense of the “chronic Lyme” community is that if you have persistent medical issues that don’t have a quick solution (or else a well-established, very expensive drug), doctors in general will just not want to deal with you, which can be very frustrating. When people don’t get the help they need, they turn to one another, for better or worse.

Your post shows the tension between science/medicine and the people who suffer from chronic problems. I know someone who had/thought she had Lyme’s. She ran from doctor to doctor, got dozens of different drugs and was often treated with disbelief. This while a person who had been pretty active before had repeated periods when she barely could leave her home or do anything else. It’s no wonder that these people try everything possible if regular doctors can’t help. What else are they supposed to do? When I taught yoga I met people with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. They all had stories of doctors questioning the validity of their symptoms. It seems if a problem isn’t documented in textbooks they have a tendency to deny its existence.

This is a great comment. A lot of what OP says is pertinent to other poorly-defined chronic diseases too.

As a community, physicians and researchers are really not capable of dealing with such conditions right now. As a result, large numbers of suffering people end up neglected and you have, for example, patients with chronic fatigue syndrome using anti-retrovirals off-label on totally spurious grounds.

"One common theme in the chronic Lyme communities is that people who go into remission tend to attribute their response to whatever technique, supplement, or medication they were trying at the time."

This is spot on. People probably have always been doing this - but now they also publish their theories to everyone on the Internet where all the outrageous claims live and prosper, because nobody writes a blog post that a given supplement did not work. This is https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood Law again.

For some time I have been thinking what is the rational thing to do when you are seriously sick in the internet era: https://medium.com/@zby/rational-patient-community-6d3617dff...

chronic lyme disease sounds like affluenza.

wealthy people utterly bored with their life and bent on financial self destruction. maybe they are just deeply unhappy with their present and want to start anew.

they should check out john sarno's work on imaginary pain created by the subsconscious mind.

I once thought I had chronic Lyme but eventually concluded it was overactive immune system related.

The value of intentional bee stings is still plausible here as there seems to value in giving the immune system 'something else to work on'.

One example is the intentional infection by intestinal tapeworm to alleviate allergies https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/23/parasit...

I thought it was interesting in the article that she was 'misdiagnosed as autoimmune arthritis'. I think it's reasonable that these autoimmune reactions could be triggered by Lyme or other factors. Curious that all the symptoms associated with Lyme are immune related (rashes, presence of antibody levels in the blood).

The clue that an overactive immune system was causing my issues came from 23andme genetic testing show many genes associated with immune disorders. Also I found that Poison Oak / Ivy would trigger many of the issues including full body reactions for months.

The gold standard in microbiology for diagnosing an infectious disease has always been to culture the organism alive. Despite notorious difficulties in culturing Borrelia burgdorferi, in about 30 studies this organism has been cultured alive from patients despite at least standard antibiotic therapy, and in many cases after antibiotics far in excess of what is deemed curative by IDSA and CDC. If the pathogen that causes a disease is still present in conjunction with symptoms compatible with that infection, it would appear to me that the fundamental questions about the cause of long term symptoms should have been answered a very long time ago. To add insult to injury, recent studies from Tulane, Johns Hopkins, and Northeastern University all demonstrate that we can’t even kill Borrelia in the test tube with the currently recommended antibiotics. What are the chances that a second disease of mysterious etiology but with the same symptoms as the first disease, would come and replace the first disease when there is published evidence that the pathogen which causes the first disease persists despite both short and long-term antibiotics? There are numerous chronic bacterial infections which require long-term combination antibiotic therapies: Tuberculosis, leprosy, coxiella endcocarditis, brucellosis, Whipple’s. Why should Lyme be different?

>In 2016, Venkata Raveendra Pothineni and colleagues at Stanford reported on new drug candidates against Borrelia burgdorferi using a technique known as high-throughput screening. They ranked disulfiram as number one in activity against Bb among their top 20 hits. https://www.lymedisease.org/disulfiram-kinderlehrer/

>Dr. Kenneth Liegner has had the longest experience treating tick-borne infections with disulfiram. He is seeing sustained remissions of six months or more after completing treatment in many patients. Dr. Liegner’s first patient had been on triple antibiotic treatment for eight years for Lyme disease and babesiosis, and could not stop his treatment regimen without suffering a relapse. He took disulfiram for four months and has now been off all treatment for almost two and a half years, feeling better than ever. https://www.lymedisease.org/disulfiram-kinderlehrer-2/

Disulfiram is a gamechanger. People on reddit, on facebook and in the casestudy of Dokter Kenneth Liegner[0], people who were still sick after they were on antibiotics for years, are suddenly seeing amazing improvements after only a short time on Disulfiram.

Strange isn't it that an antimicrobial has such amazing results for a disease that supposedly is psychological or autoimmune...

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31151194

This should be the top comment.

I'm a bit disappointed in HN.

So many of the comments here are focused on doubting the victims and ridiculing them for their irrational beliefs.

The irony is that it's those very critics that aren't being rational.

They have the causality backwards and seem to be assuming that if antibiotics didn't eliminate the symptoms then that means the disease can't be real.

Wouldn't it be more rational to conclude that maybe the antibiotic isn't killing the pathogen?

People raised in US are more skeptical to this than those raised in other countries, because in the US, patentable treatments are generally preferred. Everything that is not patentable (or isn’t an expensive procedure like a surgery) is “alternative medicine”, even if it’s valid but isn’t profitable. Very few studies are conducted in the field of natural remedies simply because there is no money in it. Often third world countries are the ones who do more research than us in these areas.

There is a lot of quackery surrounding lyme disease, and patients who think they might have lyme can easily end up spending a fortune on dubious treatments and unproven tests.

That's certainly true, but what other option do you have? When you have Lyme, you are an explorer in an alien landscape. Medicine has not caught up to the incidence of the disease, and people with Lyme must do something. They can't all just wait around in pain and misery for the FDA to approve a treatment.

I think the controversy is mostly around 'chronic' Lyme. It's not clear there is such a thing. It's profile (being mostly female for example) suggests it's not Lyme but some other condition that is undiagnosed. Having multiple family members with Lyme at some point I know it's a terrible disease and difficult to treat.

Lyme disease is easily curable with a large course of antibiotics. Now, there can be complications that persist after the infection is cured (arthritis, cardiac issues, and - controversially - fatigue and post-treatment Lyme syndrome). But the infection itself is curable today.

You are technically right, but I find this pedantry counterproductive. When someone is simply frustrated by their lack of options to alleviate their suffering, inserting yourself solely to make sure they're using the rightest possible terminology while ignoring their actual point a) doesn't add anything of value to the discussion, unless the distinctions between any of these terms can materially advance the discussion, b) is plainly dismissive of people's distress, and c) probably incorrectly assumes that they don't actually know what they're talking about when many people who are experiencing the alleged long-term side effects of Lyme, such as my wife, use that word as colloquial umbrella term to describe their symptoms. They've probably read more about it than you have, but writing out "fatigue and post-treatment Lyme syndrome" gets old.

The problem is that most of these people who are diagnosed by "chronic lyme" actually have CFS (according to multiple studies). So, it's unlikely that any lyme treatments will work for these patients.

As for CFS, many people do fully recover from that (I have myself, for example). But going down the chronic lyme rabbit hole is unlikely to bring any kind of relief.

What exactly is CFS?

Chronic fatigue syndrome.

The initial comment was using a colloquialism. It wasn’t discussing specific outcomes or treatments for which precise terminology would have been necessary. The correction was pure pedantry.

The antibiotic treatment is only effective within a few weeks of getting bitten. If you are misdiagnosed and miss the treatment window, the antibiotic treatment is no longer effective.

Nope:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067368...

The story reminds me of the people doing intentional helminth infestation (e.g. hookworm) as a treatment for issues like asthma and IBD. My sense was that helminth treatments are on pretty solid scientific ground -- of the kind where we don't have large N studies but that's only because it would be hard to get approval for them -- but maybe that's not true? Reading this article has me wondering if it's all just placebo and eventual recovery.

Also, the one about patients doing gut-transfers to help with their very difficult gut flora issues.

r/medicine: "Chronic Lyme Disease doesn't exist"

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/cpji9c/chronic_ly...

Anyone in the medical profession who denies the existence of biofilms, and their capacity to harbor antibiotic resistant infections is an idiot.

There's plenty of research to explain how late stage Lyme disease can evade antibiotics, and cause a longterm chronic infection.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6287027/

https://rawlsmd.com/health-articles/understanding-biofilm

The science is clear that the spirochetes that cause Lyme disease can and do hide within biofilms and evade antibiotics.

As someone who has Lyme disease, and who has undergone multiple therapies to overcome it I can tell you that biofilms and persister cells are the reason for chronic Lyme disease. It is very real, perfectly logical, and the science on how Lyme disease becomes chronic is overwhelming and supported by medical research.

> Oxygen and nitric oxide penetrating into the biofilm can help degrade the biofilm.

I once read an article how sunlight produces nitric oxide which loosens arteries and reduces blood pressure. Will sun therapy help biofilm disorders?

Not sure.

Wouldn’t classify biofilms as a disorder, it’s how many bacterial, parasitic, and fungal infections work. It’s a mechanism for survival for these pathogens. Just because pharma companies and our corrupt medical system ignorantly ignored them doesn’t mean they haven’t been an ongoing health issue for all mammals on this planet forever basically.

Plasma EMF therapy is something I’ve tried but it requires proximity and a frequency generator tuned to specific frequencies to target biofilms. While the sun is the largest emitter of plasma available we can’t exactly tune it to a specific frequency, you get what you get depending on UV and weather conditions that day. I can tell you sun light is a disinfectant for some pathogens but for Lyme disease biofilms I can’t tell you.

Hyperbaric oxygen chambers work because they’re pressurized. The medication Alinia also has action against biofilms and cyst forms of Lyme disease although more research is needed.

This sounds a lot like the Amazonian medicine Kambo, which is tree frog poison. The practitioner burns a small hole on the top layer of the recipient's skin, rubs off the burnt layer, and applies a drop of frog poison mixed with the saliva. The poison almost immediately causes an extreme lymphatic reaction that is thought to clear toxins from the body. Kambo is called the vaccine of the Amazon.

The bee sting mechanism seems much the same. Poisoning the body in order to stimulate the immune system.

I believe colloquially the call that frog “the doctor” (shown in Vice Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia https://youtu.be/C3Yd7M3JNlw)

Bad video title...You don't trip on Kambo. It doesn't contain any tryptamines and is 100% legal. You wouldn't want to smoke it

The bufo alvarius toad, however, contains 5-MeO-DMT (and a few other molecules). (And the only safe way to use that is to vape the excretion)

nit: s/excretion/secretion/ excretion is waste.

Just choked on my tea laughing. Whoops typo!

Came here to mention Kambo as it was my first thought too. (Kambo has been used to treat lyme disease, as well. I doubt there have been any official studies unfortunately).

Also, one doesn't _need_ to use saliva, that's usually only done due to lack of clean water in the amazon (Source: am an IAKP certified practitioner)

I've been told by a practitioner that saliva activates the kambo better than plain water, but who knows.

I've been trying kambo for ulcerative colitis over the past year. My gastroenterologist is perfectly happy to have me take a variety of medications for the rest of my life, whose safety has only been studied over a six-month period.

Western medicine gets the job done, it's true, but it's time to open our minds to Eastern medicine and so-called "folk medicine." Many of these treatments can complement Western medicine.

In my case, Traditional Chinese medicinal herbs have been clinically proven to enhance the efficacy of drugs used to treat Ulcerative Colitis

Some can complement but many are voodoo magic with no evidence of efficacy and advocating for their adoption to the detriment in trust in actual medical science is a grave disservice to society. You might be able to tell the difference but many people can't and what you're advocating will turn many people into Steve Jobs esque avoidable disasters because they believe some practitioner with traditional knowledge who can't read an x-ray.

Think carefully about all the effects of what you're recommending

Kudos for being up to the challenge of trying Kambo, it ain't an easy medicine. Am curious about any benefits you've seen to your condition (has your doctor noticed any changes?).

Western medicine does seem more concerned with maintenance of the symptoms than treating root causes unfortunately.

Since you mentioned TCM, I'd take a hard look at medicinal mushrooms like reishi and lion's mane as they're said to help with ulcers (I'm not a doctor, definitely do your own research and ask your doctor).

Western medicine is just defined as medicine that has been through a rigorous clinical trial process that actually proves it works.

Until these Eastern medicine have gone through the same process, it’s just anecdotal evidence.

That definition practically speaking though also has other implications. Primarily that the only medicine that even gets the opportunity to go through a clinical trial process. Some medicines are so abundant that it's hard to profit from discoveries about them.

It’s true there isn’t a financial motivation, but there are plenty of trials run with government grants.

Fact is, if they really are beneficial, physicians want to know and are willing to spend time and money to collect data.

> Western medicine is just defined as medicine that has been through a rigorous clinical trial process that actually proves it works.

Given that off-label prescriptions are a thing, it's more medicine that's been proven to a satisfactory degree to be safe enough and to work for something. Lots of Western medicine as actually applied is anecdotal.

The TCM treatment I am currently using is, in fact, proven to treat ulcerative colitis via a clinical trial.

My older brother received this exact treatment specifically for persistent Lyme. The procedure was repeated ten times over the course of ten days, and he claims all symptoms he had attributed to the infection were gone within a day following the second treatment. Anecdotal, I know, but I am planing on going through with the process myself once I have the time as I can personally see the difference in his energy level, and cognitive performance. I can relay questions if anyone is interested.

Someone on another HN thread about Lyme disease described curing their persistent treatment-resistant infection with a long fast.

I wonder if these folks who are stinging themselves have already tried something like that.

If memory serves it was a fast long enough to significantly weaken the immune system, to the point that the person said they were the sickest and weakest they had ever been in their life. Then when they resumed feeding, their immune system went into overdrive and cleared the infection.

Edit:

Found the comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20494464

Their linked writeup seems to be down, archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190820205143/http://www.smashco...

What are the chances if I search for "apple cider vinegar" and lyme disease that a few will suggest ACV as the cure?

I don't know, but the probability that an HN article discussing a misunderstood chronic disease is 100% likely to attract at least one snarky dismissive comment such as your's.

A better use of your time might be to thank god/providence that you haven't been cursed with such a condition.

I've have my own chronic health issues. Perhaps people should not post these fake untested approaches as if they are real so we can focus on the real ones. They just clutter up the searches. How can ACV be the treatment for hundreds of ailments?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com