Lyme Disease

Supporting your Immune System: What Should You Eat?

For patients battling Lyme disease and tick-borne illnesses, nutrition plays a critical role in recovery. Food can serve so many purposes; from enjoyment and pleasure to tissue healing and reducing inflammation.  Besides avoiding major inflammatory ingredients (such as processed foods, inflammatory oils, alcohol, added sugar, and artificial sweeteners), it is important to specifically support the immune system, as that is the critical component to overall healing. For immune wellness, here are some key components:

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Don’t Get Ticked Off, Be Tick Smart

With the warm weather we are all starting to spend more time outside and venturing on to grassy playing fields and into the woods. We are not the only ones who emerge from hibernation with the warming temperatures, ticks also come out to play. We need to be aware of how to prevent tick bites and what to do if we get one! 

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Is There a “Lyme Diet”?

For individuals affected by Lyme disease, treatment can take many forms. There are medicines and herbals. Complimentary therapies and mental health support. And diet can make a substantial impact for most people. Rather than one particular “Lyme diet”, nutrition is as individualized throughout one’s Lyme healing journey as it is throughout one’s lifetime. No one “diet” is meant to serve a person their entire lives—nutrition therapy is meant to shape one’s particular needs at any life stage or healing phase.

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Living with Chronic Pain

As the weather is getting warmer and we are emerging from our winter hibernations through spring blossoms and soon into early summer, we will see a rise in tick borne infectious disease. Lyme disease is a bacterial infection we get from infected ticks. Symptoms of the initial infection may or may not include a bullseye rash but can also include fever, headache, chills, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes. If the infection isn’t treated promptly, symptoms can progress into neurological tissue and cause systemic and local inflammation that manifests as arthritis, severe joint and nerve pain, dizziness and cognitive issues, and memory problems.

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What Can You do to Prevent Ticks?

Happy beginning of spring! With the weather warming up, we are all so excited to venture outdoors, set up our gardens, walk new trails, and enjoy all that mother nature has to offer. However, this is the time of the year where ticks are also increasing their outdoor presence. It is important to remember that ticks are not only present in deep wooded areas, but are also present in common places that you may be in every day, such as your yard. It is best practice to try to be as tick safe as possible whenever you are outdoors, even if you are not in the woods. 

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Tick Prevention and Good Nutrition

In this day and age, the likelihood of getting a tick bite, either directly or from a tick carried in by a pet, is pretty good! That’s the bad news. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the good news is you can do something about protecting yourself. Certainly, equipping yourself with proper outdoor gear helps but you can protect yourself from the inside as well. That’s where good nutrition can lend itself. The right nutrition can really support your immune system, fighting infections and battling bacteria so it doesn’t take root, causing a myriad of symptoms. We can especially support our immune system by improving gut health (where most of the immune system lives) and lowering overall inflammation in the body. 

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Lyme: Diet is a BIG Deal!

Lyme and tick-borne diseases affect the body in a myriad of ways. On a basic level, they trigger the immune system. When we get infected, the immune system is designed to kick in, causing an inflammatory response, and enlisting the body’s army of mighty cells to target the invaders, killing the bacteria and restoring the body to homeostasis. When we talk about diet and nutrition, we can see that with this simple immune response, diet plays a major role.

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Supporting Lyme by Calming the Mind

One of the basic concepts of integrative, naturopathic, and Chinese medicine is that given the right conditions and support, the body has an inherent ability to regulate and heal.  This can take a long time when something as noxious as Lyme disease and its co-infections have set in, but healing is possible and we are here to support you.  Chinese medicine works with the body’s life force, not against it.  When the body and mind feel fragile, hypersensitive, and exhausted, acupuncture can help relieve physical and emotional discomfort by toning down pain and heightened anxiety, and nourishing the depletion of chronic disease to not only relieve fatigue but build stamina and reserves

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Lyme Testing: What Should You Know?

Testing for a Lyme infection can be challenging. The primary test used is an antibody test; the presence of antibodies is an immune system response and therefore confirms exposure to the bacteria. However, the test is not great at determining the date of the exposure. We can only know the date of exposure if there was a known tick bite and symptoms develop. Direct methods of testing for Lyme, such as PCR testing, exist but are not very sensitive. A negative PCR test does not mean that an infection does not exist…

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An Interview with Dr. Stram: How Effective are the Current Conventional Treatments for Lyme Disease?

In this interview, we asked the founder of the Stram Center, Dr. Ronald Stram, how effective current antibiotic protocols are in regard to Lyme disease treatment. Dr. Stram has devoted his career to those suffering from chronic illnesses, specifically tick-borne diseases. Since 2003, the Stram Center has served nearly 10,000 patients suffering from Lyme disease all across the globe. Dr. Stram discusses how ineffective and potentially dangerous a single dose of doxycycline is without the proper testing of the tick species, and careful evaluation of the symptoms now and over the next three months. Furthermore, Dr. Stram reviews antibiotic effectiveness, and the Stram Center’s unique approach to treatment. 

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