Chronic Lyme Symptoms

Hey everybody. Dr. Diane Lyme expert here. And in this video, we're going to talk a little bit about chronic Lyme disease symptoms. Now, acute and chronic Lyme disease symptoms are dramatically different for a lot of people, acute wise. A lot of people I should actually see say a lot, a decent amount of people get that bullseye target lesion rash, but not everybody gets that in acute Lyme. Now, one of the things that's really common to have happen is acute Lyme can just look like colds or flus. People don't even know they really have acute Lyme a lot of times. And we think the body takes care of it just like it takes care of a cold or flu. And what winds up happening for many people is the Lyme burrows, it goes deeper in our tissues, and when that happens, it goes dormant. And so then chronic Lyme occurs after sometimes years, decades, even years, usually after some sort of stressor or some sort of other infection or virus or something that's hard on the system. And that creates a perfect storm for the Lyme that's been dormant, for the Borrelia, that bacteria that's been dormant to come out of hiding. Now when it comes out of hiding, it basically is now acting in a super inflammatory way. So if you have blood brain barrier disease, for example, the Lyme toxins can actually cross into the brain and cause things like brain fog, neuroinflammation can cause the cells to die. There's even some studies linking the toxins that get into the brain from Lyme being linked to things like Alzheimer's plaques, for example. So there's a lot that can happen with the neurological system because Lyme does burrow and travel. It has its corkscrew shape and it has a splagella like a tail. So it makes it really mobile. So this allows it to basically switch, swim through the body. And it can cause such a wide variety of symptoms. So you're really looking out for chronic Lyme. The way I describe it is look for anything that is widely systemic. And if you have anything, such as pain, fibromyalgia, temperature, dysregulation, headaches, chronic fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, insomnia, hormonal issues, digestive problem problems, problems with exercise intolerance, heart problems, heart palpitations, anxiety, depression, like on and on and on, you can see this list is really big. But what you're really looking for are it's a multiple systemic thing, meaning if you only have sadness, if you only have depression, right, and you have no other symptoms, it's probably not Lyme disease. Because of Lyme disease ability to burrow and spread, it tends to affect multiple things at once. If you have multiple symptoms, symptoms all over the body, that's a huge red flag for something like Lyme. And you especially want to think about Lyme when you have multiple symptoms like this, and they can't be explained by some of the basic tests, right? So if you have chronic fatigue and you get your thyroid tested and it's like, well, thyroid's a little bit out of balance. You fix that out of balance, or even it's a lot out of balance, Maybe you get on some thyroid replacement therapy and it's like, well, maybe you have a little more energy, but didn't really work. You know, that type of thing. You want to think about something like Lyme disease. So. And you always want to remember with chronic Lyme that there's an immunodisregulation that typically occurs with it. So for most people, chronic Lyme truly is a problem of an underlying deeper immunological dysfunction. So what winds up happening when we have chronic Lyme is our immune system starts going crazy, right? And when our immune system starts going crazy, we. What winds up happening is our immune system winds up oftentimes collecting other diseases, collecting other imbalances. So we have more infections, right? We have more toxins. The other thing is the bacteria, the borrelia bacteria, that causes Lyme disease. The toxins, when they get into the brain, can cause a lowering of some of our brain hormones, and that changes the signaling pathways for the rest of our body. So Lyme disease can actually lead to subsequent, down the road, low thyroid, low cortisol, low sex hormones, hormones, all of these different things. So we have multiple systems involved. So I know it's a lot to really think about, like, wow, Lyme can cause so many things, but it really can. It's the great mimicker. So if you see widespread symptoms, this is when you're going to make sure you want to get tested thoroughly for Lyme disease. Check out some of the other information in our blog on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you're watching this on YouTube and check out some of the information to learn more about testing and these sorts of things. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time.