Dr. Diane Mueller explains how doxycycline clears acute Lyme but may push the bacteria into dormant forms, raising recurrence risk. Prolonged antibiotics can damage your microbiome and immune system, sometimes making things worse. She recommends herbal therapies for chronic Lyme and antibiotics only for acute cases, with a Lyme-literate doctor.
Hey, Dr. Diane Mueller, founder of my lymedoc here, and we're going to talk about antibiotics and Lyme disease. Now, doxycycline is the most commonly used antibiotic for Lyme disease. And in an acute situation, for many people, it can make sense. One of the things to understand though, about antibiotics in general is that you have to understand that Lyme has three different morphologies, also known as shapes. And this is really important when it comes to tricks treatment. So what Lyme disease can do because it has all these different morphologies, these different shapes, is it can change from one shape to another. The reason this is important is because the way antibiotics work is antibiotics will be able to attack one of the shapes, but not all of the shapes. So one of the things we can see happen is that we can actually see that when we have antibiotics used, like doxy, for example, it does a really great job of cleaning, clearing one of the shapes from the blood. Really, really, really well. That's like why it got such a reputation for Lyme. But there's multiple studies showing that it also increases turning into another shape in two fold. And so we get more of this other shape, this more dormant shape. And some of the concern is oftentimes people feel better when they take it. Absolutely. But the concern when I look at the literature that I see with this is what's happening is that that Lyme then is going into this more dormant form. People feel initially better, and then years later, when we have stress, when we get an infection, when something else happens, all of a sudden that Lyme wakes out of dormancy, and all of a sudden we have chronic Lyme, and now it's manifesting as pain, as fibromyalgia, as autoimmune diseases, neurological problems, as brain fog, as dysautonomia. Excuse me. And is manifesting as all of these different types of diseases. Right. And nobody is trac to Lyme. And oftentimes we don't even think to mention this to our clinician because that was so many years ago. We took an antibiotic and we felt better. So it doesn't even like get on our radar. So if you are going to use antibiotics, it's definitely a good idea to really work with a Lyme literate doc who can work with all of these three shapes. And that's true whether it's in an acute form, on a chronic form. Most people for chronic form, I tend to strongly recommend herbal medicine. Now there is, you know, definitely people that use antibiotics, and it's Good to have all of the tools in the toolkit. So by no means am I saying like we don't want that in the toolkit, right? We want with these types of diseases that are so chronic, we want to have as many tools in the toolkit as possible. But one of the things I see with chronic Lyme is when we are doing this, you know, this huge amount of antibiotics, one of the things that will wind up happening is we will wind up killing oftentimes our microbiome, because in order to work with chronic Lyme, most of the time we want to be on triple antibiotic therapy. And for most people, this is not like a few week thing. This is a many month thing and sometimes even a couple year long thing. And that's a way long time to be on antibiotics, right? It kills the microbiome. And so we don't just have a microbiome in our gut. A lot of people know about the microbiome in our gut, but we have a microbiome in our oral cavity and our nasal cavity and our genital cavity in our skin. Right. We have this microbiome out our bodies basically everywhere. And when we take our antibiotics for this long, we're actually killing off our immune system because our microbiome provides us so much of our immune regulatory system. So one of the concerns and one of the things I see happen is some people do really well, like I said, and some people, it's the right treatment, but other people really, really crash and they have a real hard time getting their footing under them again. So it's a little bit of a game of Russian roulette sometimes, especially with chronic Lyme, when we're starting with antibiotics. For most people, I recommend start with somebody that's a Lyme literate doctor. Start with somebody that really knows what they're doing with with herbs and therapies, and make sure that you are starting with herbs because you want to start with the thing that's going to do the least amount of harm, because I do see way less rates of recurrence and those that treat mine with herbs versus pharmaceuticals. So absolutely want to make sure that you are focused on that and really focused on that super fully. So think about that. Think about starting with herbal medicine. Definitely want to work with somebody that knows about working with these three forms. Make sure you're not setting yourself up for a recurrence later in life and consider antibiotics, right? Definitely. We want all your treatments in your protocols. And if it is acute Lyme, then that's a great time to use antibiotics, but just work with somebody that is aware of how to treat all three of these forms so you don't get into a situation where you're going to have a recurrence later down the road because you put the Borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme, into dormancy and now it's going to come back up. So if you need any help with this at all, look in the show notes for my clinic information at my Lyme doc. If you do like this information, please do hit the subscribe button. And if you are reading this on my blog, please read on for more. See you next time.
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