I was out walking with my family when — lo and behold! — I found a tick on my leg. Do I have Lyme disease now? Should I panic?
No. Stop. First, take a step back.
If I have a tick and a very red rash along with fever and fatigue, then I may have reason to consider whether I have acute Lyme disease.
When I wrote my first blog about Lyme disease three years ago, I never imagined that chronic Lyme disease would become such a major medical topic. Today many practitioners have become 'Lyme experts' and order blood tests as soon as they suspect a particular symptom pattern.
I never imagined that Lyme disease would have to account for so many conditions and symptoms.
If I desperately want to be convinced that I have an illness that can be traced back to a single, solitary cause, then of course it's easier to file it under Lyme disease.
Would you like my opinion? From a homeopathic perspective the whole thing need not be complicated or even worrying.
We know that there are about 100 trillion cells in the body. And only 10% of those are human cells. That means roughly 90% of the cells in our body consist of tiny microorganisms.
Please don’t panic and rush to the shower to try to wash away the little devils with a bottle of disinfectant! It’s all natural and it’s meant to be. We are built that way by nature. Conversely, that also means we will naturally find many microorganisms if we submit to a blood test.
And unfortunately we like to get caught up in so-called fashionable diseases. You know what I mean…
When SARS was declared the enemy, there was great alarm.
Then came Ebola and everyone panicked.
The same goes for swine and bird flu and many others.
This year it’s therefore a 'tick year' and consequently Lyme season.
Before you regard Lyme disease as a terrifying new phenomenon, think of Ötzi, or the man from the ice, as many call him. About 25 years ago Ötzi’s frozen remains were found in the Alps. He lived 5,300 years ago and died from an arrow in the head.
Scientists examined him very closely and — it will hardly surprise you — it is believed that he carried the Lyme bacterium. Thus he would be the oldest person with Lyme disease.
That means this disease has existed for at least 5,300 years.
So if a test now comes back positive (showing that one of the 90 trillion cells carries the pathogen), the chances are good that CHRONIC Lyme disease will be diagnosed, especially if the doctor specialises in this disease.
Usually an antibiotic is prescribed. MANY antibiotics over a LONG period of time. And this approach is favoured not only by conventional medical doctors but also by alternative practitioners, such as naturopaths.
My concern is that there is an attempt to attribute medically unexplained symptoms to infections in general and to Borrelia (Lyme bacteria) in particular. Strange though that even the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) warns against long-term antibiotic treatment for chronic Lyme disease.
You must understand one thing: most people do not come to my clinic at the beginning of an illness. I always say my clients don’t run into my consulting room, they crawl. When everything else has failed, homeopathy is meant to help.
So clients come to me with symptoms that have been diagnosed as Lyme disease and treated with antibiotics. Either these have not helped or — in the worst cases — long-term antibiotic therapy has led to serious side effects that have significantly worsened these people’s lives.
I’m not saying these opposing opinions are right or wrong. But I believe we should take some distance.
Is it really proven that the cause of these symptoms is Lyme disease? And perhaps more importantly: does it really matter?
There are paradigms in healthcare that, using tests, try to find out why the symptoms appear. It is usually alternative practitioners who engage with this question. They look at the second layer of an illness — beyond symptoms and diagnosis — and believe they can cure the underlying disease.
The why takes top priority, while the how and what play no role. Homeopathy takes a different view.
In the homeopathic method I teach, the conventional diagnosis and its symptoms come first.
You read that correctly: by bringing in a broadly defined diagnosis such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue together with a symptom picture, we almost imperceptibly treat the root, the real cause, without having to worry which microorganism is raging in the body.
We focus on the first layer of an illness. I repeatedly find that asking why can distort the picture, because it cannot be said for certain that a particular spirochaete is the cause of the illness.
I believe that only facts count. We don’t want to complicate the situation unnecessarily by searching for the cause. We must know what the patient is experiencing in the moment. What are the facts? I want a diagnosis, not theory.
So if I am sure I have been bitten by a tick — I saw it — I take Ledum palustre C200 immediately.
Ledum acts not only prophylactically (to prevent insect stings and bites and their potential pathogens) but also curatively. It is taken on the first day roughly every three hours and then twice daily for a week.
Then twice a week for a month, until it can be reduced to one dose a week for a further month.
If a bite occurred no more than a few months ago, this method is applied unchanged. In my family Ledum is used for a wide range of insect and animal bites. It has always worked so far — for 30 years. Also on the farm for our animals.
My clients and students report the same to me.
With this remedy I no longer have to worry. To be honest: my family and I have only ever taken Ledum for a few days.
In my last blog about Lyme disease I also wrote about Aurum arsenicosum C200 as an additional remedy (especially for situations where the tick was not found immediately and there is a clear link between the bite and Lyme disease).
This remedy can sometimes be difficult to obtain and I would like to offer you an alternative here. In the second step you take — in addition to Ledum — Hypericum perforatum 200 in combination with Arsenicum album 200, twice daily for a week. The remedies are tapered off in the same way as Ledum. I personally haven’t had to use this step, but if you are concerned you can resort to step 2.
'In combination' means: a dose of Hypericum 200 is placed under the tongue, followed by a dose of Arsenicum album 200. This is how remedies are taken together by the body.
We now know that Lyme disease is not a new or necessarily terrifying illness. With the right remedies in your medicine cabinet you will get through tick season unscathed.
After all, homeopathy is a healing method that has been practised in the service of humanity for 230 years, entirely independent of any known or unknown microorganisms.
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