Lyme Disease: Not Just a Tickborne Disease Any More

[mellowsong]

Dr. Joseph Mercola
5 February 2012

Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD is well known for his successful treatment of neurological illness and chronic pain with Integrative Medicine.

Here, he shares his latest insights into Lyme disease, including its causes, confounding factors that can make proper diagnosis elusive, and how to get around them, along with his own treatment protocol.

Read more: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...e-disease.aspx

[Islander]

Hard for me to see the potential connection between the two. Admittedly I haven't watched the video nor have I had time to read the transcript — been out all morning. I'll get back to it.

[mellowsong]

I've followed Dr. Klinghardt for a few years now and found this to be a very enlightening article. His feeling that there is a correlation between EMR and increased virulence is very interesting.

[Reesacat]

I thought the new definition of Lyme disease (illnesses transferred by insects, as opposed to simply a tick-borne disease) was very interesting. And the fact that mosquitoes, fleas, spiders, mites, etc. can spread it — makes it much more of a problem in chronic illnesses. With the bad diet and low Vitamin D levels people can't fight regular viruses and bacterial infections......
Dr. Klinghardt is a pioneer and a champion for all of us with mystery illnesses. Thank you Mellow for a great article

[Islander]

Now that I've read the transcript and listened to a portion of the video...

First, no question Klinghardt is a trusted authority (unlike some of the puffballs that he's hosted, e.g. Jaminet, or Geer Hamer with his German New Medicine).

That said...knowing what we do about genetics and epigenetics, it's no surprise that bits of random DNA have been encoded in our genes. Not surprising that infections are behind a lot of chronic and perplexing diseases (like CFIDs and MCS). The Red Cross has been testing for Babesia for about the last 12 months. There's been preliminary research into a viral cause of CFIDS. It may well be that all are related in the way Klinghardt suggests.

Getting into the transcript, at about minute 58 the transcriber misses a lot that he/she is calling "indiscernible." I fwded the tape to listen (I've transcribed hundreds of tapes) and actually the tape has been messed with, portions of it edited out, trying to compare it to the transcript gets very confusing for about 5 minutes. At one point in the transcript, for instance, Mercola asks him what he uses for the liposome, is it egg yolk, and that whole section is missing from the tape. Crikey!

One thing I have a hard time with is Klinghardt's claim that his Viressence cures insulin resistance. Yet he finds a connection...niacinamide is antimicrobial, and using it to treat spirochetes also removes insulin resistance? Wow.

I found this interesting:
DM: What type of vitamin C are you using? There is a whole argument. Do you use ascorbic acid or the calcium ascorbate or the salts of the vitamin C that any more beneficial than others?
DK: I use a product that has a lot of the natural co-factors in it. I don’t want to actually say the name because it’s a commercial available product that’s used for people suffering from allergies. It has some quercetin in it and some of the typical flavonoids and other things from (indiscernible 1:32:23) and from some of the natural...I do strongly feel that the co-factors of vitamin C are just as important as the vitamin C. However this is for the long run. For the acute run, just straight ascorbic acid works.

This sounds exactly like the product I'm using.

Bottom line? Very impressed. I know people my age who have struggled with Lyme disease for a lifetime, as have their children. Interestingly, they grew up not far from Plum Island...the place where conspiracy theorists think the military engineered the Lyme virus as a bioweapon...that escaped. Or was an experiment gone wrong. I'm not a conspiracist, as you know, just mentioning it because it was brought up in the interview.

[mellowsong]

Although Lyme was never fully confirmed by Western Blot testing, there is a 99% chance that I contracted Lyme disease from a spider bite in spring 2007. Symptoms flared in summer 2009. Anyway, to make a long story short, my CD57 number was very low and the doc just wanted to treat me rather than wait for an Igenex test. I did take 3 months of doxycycline with a 2 week course of Tindamax between each round. Although I felt really awful for a good part of that treatment, once symptoms were gone they did not recur. So, one case where I believe antibiotics were necessary and they worked, at least for me. I have a friend who is currently a patient at Dr. K's clinic. She blogged about her 4 day stay there and it was really fascinating. She's been sick for years and Lyme was diagnosed last fall.