My father passed this along to me a few days ago, and I just haven’t had time to get it up until now. Apparently, this documentary came out last year. Titled Under Our Skin: There’s No Medicine for Someone Like You, I had no idea that what I and my family battled for a decade was considered to be some sort of bioweapons program gone awry. I haven’t seen the documentary, so I’ll withhold judgment for now.
As my father said in the email in which he sent me this trailer, we were blessed to have a doctor who understood the nature of the disease, as well as the nature of the body, and went well outside accepted protocol in order to treat the disease–and cure it.
I noticed that there is a character in the movie named Jordan Fisher Smith who actually pulled a tick out of himself and worried about the possibility of Lyme, but was assured by his doctor that “Lyme is very rare in California.”
No.
It’s not.
In fact, that is why I went undiagnosed for years. No doctor wanted to believe that there was Lyme in California. But, in fact, there was a pocket of Lyme in California, and my family was not alone. Lyme wasn’t in California because it wasn’t officially in California {i.e., the government had not yet decided it was in California}.
This is one of the many reason I am against government-run healthcare. In my case, and in the case of my husband’s sickness last June–in both of these cases, what it took to beat the disease was very, very expensive. In the instance of my husband, we had great doctors and great insurance. In the instance of myself, the health insurance was okay, but my father was also willing to dish out his own money to find a doctor to treat me {and eventually himself and my mother, both of whom ended up with Lyme before it was over}.
Let me rephrase it. I am not against government-run healthcare.
I am for freedom, the freedom I have known and enjoyed already, the freedom I have exercised often.
I am for the freedom to get well.
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Alrighty, folks, hopefully you subscribed to the comments on this post. A reader sent me some information on Lyme that I read over the weekend and it is fantastic new stuff!
First, a test more accurate than the Western Blot. The Western Blot is so inaccurate that a negative result is considered by some to be meaningless while the postive result is accurate. This new test was originally designed for lupus and is called the Q-RIBb. From what I can tell, you’d need some sort of practitioner to run it for you as it involves a blood draw.
The new treatment is called TOA-free Chemotype Cat’s Claw, and the trade name is Samento, I believe. I read a little article on the course of the disease, and it looks like doctors are giving Samento for 8-12 months so that every stage of the disease (the spirochete actually changes form as it matures and also as its environment changes, which is what makes it so hard to fight) is combatted.
I thought especially of a couple of you who mentioned that you have close family members fighting the disease. This might be something to try!
Rachel,
I checked my archives, and as far as I can tell I’ve never written about it in depth. I think I’ve mainly mentioned it in passing in the comments.
I became ill somewhere between age 10 and 12, but wasn’t diagnosed until I was…I don’t know…probably 14 or maybe even 15. I spent a couple of years in there using crutches for months at a time because one leg was mysteriously too painful to walk on. We finally began to use a doctor used by another student at my ballet studio (who also had Lyme). What ensued was many years of oral antibiotics, mainly doxycycline and biaxin, if I remember correctly. I also took an anti-inflamatory for pain control. Our doctor also gave us a list of supplements to take, including probiotics, in order to attempt to mitigate the negative side-effects of all of the toxins in the antibiotics. By the time I turned 20 or 21, I was considered cured (which was defined by our doctor as 3 clean Western blot tests in a row, spaced out three months apart, plus asymptomatic), and I haven’t had a problem since. So that was a little over 5 years straight taking antiobiotics.
My parents received a similar protocol, though I don’t recall how many years they spent taking antibiotics as I left home at 18, and they and I were all still sick at the time.
If you are interested in reading up on some of the latest theory on Lyme, Mercola’s site has excerpts from a paper by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt.
Have you written about Lyme disease in the past? How was yours treated? We don’t have Lyme in our family (at least, not that I’m aware of), but we do know several people who have been diagnosed with it, and it seems to be a mystery to most medical professionals.
Wow, ladies! You know, I didn’t really think about how many of you may have personally been touched by Lyme! I know the rates are high, but still…
Wendi, I am so glad your husband got immediate attention! From what I have read, the majority of us who have these years-long battles were either misdiagnosed or undiagnosed in the beginning, and the disease got the upper hand during that time spent without treatment. Praise God that didn’t happen to him!
GJ,
Are you happy with the treatment you are getting for your son? If I remember correctly, you are in CA, too. If you ever want to compare notes, you can email me privately. I hate seeing folks continue to suffer as I had to.
KM,
I feel so badly for your friends encountering this difficulty in attaining treatment when they already feel so badly! That is how I felt in our town–I even had doctors tell my parents it was psychosomatic–as if I actually wanted to be sick or something. I was so relieved to finally have a diagnosis and treatment plan.
A few thoughts on Lyme:
I even recently read that it is estimated that 4 out of 5 children with autism would test positive for Lyme (if the study that number is based on is a solid one, and I believe it might be). It is often overlooked that moms can, for instance, pass Lyme to their children through the umbilical cord and through breast milk.
I have spent a lot of time over the years researching the potential of “natural” (i.e., over-the-counter or energy-based medicine) remedies for Lyme, and I have come up mostly empty-handed. I think that the biggest benefit of energy medicine in regard to assisting recovery is its potential to reverse the subsequent DNA damage caused by the spirochetes.
I know a few people in Illinois who have it and face many of the same issues – doctors not believing them because it’s supposedly do very rare. There are also a lot of doctors (specialists mostly) that have outright refused to treat them because of the Lyme. It just makes treatment too complicated so they refuse. It’s so frustrating!
Thank you, Brandy. Our son got Lyme Disease and it was many months before we found a doctor outside of our HMO to treat it as such. It was out-of-pocket expenses for antibiotic treatment from then on. This started about eight years ago and he hasn’t recovered fully yet.
We live in an area that has an incredibly high number of lyme disease cases. We found that out when my husband tested positive for it a couple years ago.
At a recent homeschool support meeting there were about ten of us in attendance and four of us had immediate family members that had lyme.
Thankfully, my husband was diagnosed within a few weeks of finding the tick, the antibiotic regimen worked for him. I’ve spoken with others that have had some really bad experiences with just getting the correct diagnosis…
I wholeheartedly agree with your stance on government healthcare. Our freedom is precious, not something we should take lightly and give up so easily.