Candida or Lyme disease?
I have been living with Lyme disease since 1995. I still test positive for Borrelia IgG and IgM on a Western Blot, and also immunofluorescence tests come out positive.
The lab that tested me at my own initiative is a “reference laboratory”, a lab that sets the standards for, and verifies the results from all other labs in the region in case there are ambiguities.
That lab even asked me to send more of my serum, to be used as a “golden standard” for Lyme infection, as I test positive for both Borrelia afzelii as well as Borrelia garinii, the prevalent European strains. Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto is more prevalent in the US. I showed this letter to my local ID specialist, who shrugged his shoulders at it.
I have a textbook case of neuroborreliosis. Bitten by many ticks from an endemic Lyme area, some of which were only discovered embedded in my back days later, wrongly removed so that their stomach contents was pushed into my bloodstream, followed by the classical bullseye rash (Erythema Migrans) and a myriad of typical Lyme symptoms. I did not receive treatment until four years later, when I almost died and it had become too late for a full cure.
Since then, I have been on a near-continuous regimen of broadspectrum antibiotics. Over the past decade I have taken Doxycycline, Minocycline, Tinidazole, Metronidazole, Amoxicillin, Clarithromycin, Azithromycin, Trimethoprim-Sulfamethoxazole and even Hydroxychloroquine because it is synergistic with the antibiotics. I never used intravenous abx. because they carry significant risks and from what I have read, they seem to about as effective (or ineffective) as the much cheaper orals. I like to keep the IV option in case the orals I use now stop working. There isn’t any choice in orals either: Neuroborreliosis needs an antibiotic that penetrates the blood-brain barrier, and the only oral antibiotics that do that are a fcouple in the family of the Tetracyclines: Doxy- and Minocycline.
A sizeable proportion of people putting their hope in our Candida treatment Lufenuron are in fact suffering from something that can’t be distinguished, at least symptom-wise, from neuro-Lyme. These people are most seriously ill. We’re talking about people so sick that they are unable to work and so miserable that they’re seriously contemplating suicide. I know I have.
I almost literally went through hell and back with my Lyme and it pains me to see how others are going to hell but won’t make it back. My symptoms were very serious. I ended up in an ambulance, taken to an IC ward, put on oxygen, a full set of EEG leads on my body and an IV in my arm. During the years that followed, I lived like a zombie. A tormented, half-paranoid soul who lost all her friends and who would get a fit if she heard a teaspoon stirring. Violent mood swings, chronic headaches, joint pains, severe heart rhythm problems such as 175 bpm sinus tachycardia when trying to relax, ADHD, memory problems, problems talking, extreme fatigue, balance problems, excessive perspiration, muscle cramps, anxiety attacks, tingling limbs, loss of motor function in the fingers etc. I still have some of that and I still need antibiotics or I suffer a quick and severe relapse.
Do some of these symptoms sound familiar to you? Did you think they may have something to do with Candida? They might not.
Everything I write is my personal opinion, based on scientific research by others. I do not have all the answers, but I have observed myself during all those years, I have postulated, experimented and studied the available medical literature.
Fact is that the etiology, the cause of almost all disease is officially unknown. The medical-industrial complex likes you to think otherwise. They claim that “Our knowledge doubles every few years”, making it an exponential curve towards imminent omniscience if you believe them. Or they waffle about “autoimmunity” and ignore the evidence of living Bb bacteria in the brains of deceased MS patients, for example. Autoimmunity my ass. God or evolution did not make such basic mistakes.
The sordid reality is that they are at best ignorant, and at worst lying. All they do is inventing complex-sounding names for the symptoms they don’t know what they’re caused by. Parkinson’s disease, for example. They know that the symptoms are caused by the destruction of a specific part of the brain, but they are clueless as to what actually causes it. The same with Multiple Sclerosis. The same with Alzheimer. The same with Crohn’s. The same with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. And so on and so forth. They want us to spend money on a cornucopia of symptom-relievers, they bedazzle us with mumbo-jumbo voodoo science, but when push comes to shove they’re only relieving symptoms because they don’t want to know how to attack the cause. The reasons are varied, but it all comes down this: Big Pharma makes much more money keeping you sick and addicted to symptom-relievers, than to find and eliminate the cause. Contributing factor is the monkey-nature of humans: Any doctor or researcher sticking out his head above the rest will get it chopped off. Paradigm shifts are few and far between in any discipline, most of all in medicine. It wasn’t long ago when those few surgeons that washed their hands before an operation were ridiculed by their peers.
In our day and age there are doctors who think that there is sufficient hard evidence that almost all serious chronic disease of the central nervous system is caused by mycoplasmic bacteria. These doctors are marginalized. As far as Big Pharma is concerned, this idea doesn’t even exist. There hasn’t been any significant R&D effort into developing novel antibiotics for decades. Symptom relievers are more profitable. They like us to believe that bacteria can be killed with a few weeks of antibiotics. They hide from us the myriads of effective ways bacteria have to evade the immune system, our deliberately rigged “tests” and even our antibiotics. Look up “efflux pumps”, for example. Antibiotics only kill bacteria when they’re growing or dividing. But bacteria such as Bb, Borrelia burgdorferi, divide and grow a hundred times slower than “ordinary” bacteria, turning three weeks’ treatment into six years. I will write about the flawed tests another time. Yes, tests purposely designed to yield many false negatives. Sometimes the reasons are as mundane as the necessity not to violate patents, but more often the reasons are more sinister and have to do with how best to extract the most money out of the patient. Governments have to trust the Medical-Industrial complex and politicians routinely get lucrative career offers from Big Pharma. I have done my homework. In front of me is a paperback copy of “The American Health Empire – Power, Profits and Politics – A report from the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health-PAC)”. Written by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1970, fourty years ago. It exposes how Big Pharma owns the US government. How they sabotage health care. How their diagnostic tests are rigged. How their treatments are phoney. And how this situation is deterioratingfast – in 1970!. I have been doing my homework since 1970, and you better start doing it too.
If you were a bacterium that had just invaded a human body, and you wanted a secure future for your offspring, what would you do? Where would you go? Evolution has provided bacteria with ingenious ways of surviving our immune system. There are places where our immune system can’t reach them at all – neither can antibiotics get fully rid of them. They are often invisible for any and all tests currently available. It is a complex subject matter and I can only touch upon it here.
Our immune system has cells being pumped around by the bloodstream that recognize bacteria and trigger the production of antibodies. Some cells simply “eat” bacteria . None of such cells exist in so-called “immunoprivileged sites”. Those are places in our body where there is only a severely impaired or even non-existing immune system. Examples are the synovial fluid (the fluid surrounding the joints) as well as the cartilage of the joints themselves, the liquid in the eyeball, the testes and first and foremost: The entire Central Nervous System, including the brain. So this is how a lot of chronic bacterial infections manifest themselves: Arthritis and neurological problems. The neurological problems are caused by tphenomena such as chronic vasoconstriction or neurally mediated vasospasms. This can lead to chronic pain and organ impairment anywhere in the body. Pain can also be caused by damaged neuronal tissue. Lyme bacteria eat away the insulating myelin layer around the nerves, and all kinds of mayhem ensues. On top of that comes a chronic inflammation of the capillary vessels in the brain caused by our immune response and the neurotoxins from the bacteria themselves. Last but not least: Many bacteria like to go intra-cellular: They burrow inside neurons and even T-cells, where they can survive for three months – the lifespan of such cells. Borreliae form “blebs”, “granules” and “cysts”. The former two are small particles that preserve the bacterial DNA and can later, under more favorable circumstances, grow back into a spirochete – the most advanced of all micro-organisms. The latter is a protective “bubble” around a bacterium, impenetrable to immune system cells. The short-circuiting of nerve fibers and the physical destruction of neurons, as well as the constant inflammation of the bloodvessels that feed the brain cause a wide variety of “invisible” neurological symptoms. Irritability and mood swings are just as common as balance disturbances or more serious “psychiatric” problems such as apparent paranoid behavior. Parts of the brain are being starved of oxygen due to chronic ischemia – restricted bloodflow due to neurologically- and inflammation-caused constriction of blood vessels in the brain. everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Especially the Medulla oblongata is a likely target for the bacteria, as it is their first stop from the spinal cord towards the brain. Things will go haywire. Constipation, insomnia, (sleep) apnea, heart rhythm disturbances, incontinence and a plethora of the weirdest things can and will eventually happen. When I moved my head suddenly, my heart rate would double. When I tried to sleep, my heart rate would triple. I perspired profusely, my husband watched how water dripped off my hands when I took antibiotics for the first time. The large drops formed visibly and dropped on the floor, every few seconds one until there was a wet spot on he floor. For a couple of years, I could not hold my pee. My breathing stopped several times a day and I only became aware of it because I suddenly gasped for breath, after having been non-breathing for at least a minute. Constant exhaustion was perhaps the worst part, together with the pains and the severe cardiac irregularities. Nobody understood what my problem was. They thought I was going crazy. I was getting desperate and started to lose hope.
I never received adequate medical help. I had to arrange for my own reliable diagnostic tests. I had to arrange for the proper antibiotics in their proper dosages. I still do, and I still have to pay for them myself, in spite of the fact that I have health insurance. Chronic bacterial infections of the CNS are grossly underdiagnosed, mainly because they are considered to be extremely rare – but they aren’t and that has been proven, only for the evidence to be buried. The infectious disease specialist in my local hospital refused to even look at the test results from this laboratory. “Get that out of my eyes”, were his exact words. Any test not done by them was considered bogus, even when they had no experience with Lyme disease and that lab is a recognized authority on tick-borne infections. In fact, I had been bitten less than 100 miles from that lab, so they had the proper tests for the strains that were prevalent there. See, medical doctors in the West have no interest in curing people. They’re arrogant and ignorant bureaucrats.
A picture of Lyme spirochetes attacking Lymphocytes (50 000 x):
I am very much better than ten years ago and still slowly improving. If I hadn’t found out what was wrong with me through my own research and enforced antibiotic treatment through legal threats delivered through an attorney, I would have died mere days afterwards. I know of several people – family of friends – who weren’t that persistent and predictably, they died. The uncle of a friend was hospitalized with what they thought was a rare neuromuclular disorder. They took him of life support a week later. The day after his hospitalization I found out that he had been treated for an infection of the vertebrae the year before – only with the wrong antibiotic – an antibiotic that doesn’t penetrate bone. Both his ID specialist as well as his family physician were on summer vacation and his family was unwilling to urge antibiotic treatment on my insistence alone. So he died, less than a year after starting his pension. He had worked and saved hard all his life. The autopsy showed that an infection had eaten through his spinal nerves. His family was unwilling to sue the hospital, and wouldn’t have been successful anyway. The uncle had never married and they got the inheritance. Do your homework or die. I was too ill myself with Lyme disease at that time, or I would have gone to that hospital. Anyway, his family forbade me in no uncertain terms to interfere, so as not to upset the doctors and their “beloved” uncle who was at that point on a ventilator, at the mercy of people who had neither the interest nor the competency in saving him.
The only antibiotic that helps my case is relatively large doses of Doxycycline, or about half that dose of Minocycline. It helps to occasionally combine it with Hydroxychloroquine. And it helps to alternate with Amoxicillin, every few months for a week or so. This takes care of the Lyme Encephalitis, which can act as a “Trojan Horse” for the Amoxicillin: Encephalitis “opens” the parenchyma, the capillary blood vessel cells that make the blood-brain barrier, allowing the Amoxicillin molecules through – temporarily. Any molecule that is not lipid-soluble and smaller than 500 Daltons can’t pass the BBB, except when it’s inflamed or opened by other means. You see, I did my homework. So should you, before you go and self-treat. I say it again: If your symptoms are caused by a bacterial infection of your CNS, Lufenuron is not going to help you.
Sometimes I go “cold turkey”, not taking anything for three to five weeks until exacerbating symptoms force me back. Some people believe that “pulsing” antibiotics helps. Recently I’ve observed that when I am otherwise at my healthiest, my immune system attacks the Lyme hardest and I feel worst. Nevertheless, if I then force myself to take a walk, I walk faster than normal and get less fatigued than normal. Counter-intuitive but useful – by stopping the antibiotics when you feel worst, you may in fact help your immune system eradicate the infection more effectively. Whatever you do, don’t mix classes of antibiotics and stay away from Flagyl and Fasigyn because you’ll end up with a serious Candida infection.
Again: Do your homework before you assume you have Candida. In spite of what Global Health Trax says, not everything is Candida. Some things are worse and you may have it. Find out which disease fits your symptoms before it’s too late. Do not rely on quacks, commercial websites or hysterical forums.
If many of your symptoms are neurological, please consider the fact that you may be suffering from a bacterial infection of the CNS. Candida does not produce sufficient neurotoxins that it can cause significant neurological problems. Even with the best antibiotic treatment against a bacteriological neurological infedtion, it might take months before you’ll improve, and you may worsen significantly for a year or more even, as the immune system, faced with bacterial debris, mounts a massive response and keeps responding until the bacterial load is diminished by orders of magnitude. This is complex stuff. Nobody can help you with this but yourself, as not even LLMD’s (Lyme-literate medical doctors) can be considered particularly knowledgeable. Even Joe Burrascano still combines Probenecid with Amoxicillin, whilst a study in The Lancet clearly showed that Probenecid competes with Amoxicillin’s entry into the parenchyma, leading to treatment failure in neuroborreliosis. Burrascano, allegedly the world’s #1 LLMD, refused to admit he was wrong and kept using Probenecid. All I can do is urge you to find out what’s wrong with you and then do whatever it takes to get proper treatment. Be your own doctor if you can’t get help from “The System”.
