Could Your Fatigue and Pain Be Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS)?

Welcome back to my channel on chronic illness, Lyme, and mold. I'm your host, Dr. Diane Mueller Mueller, and we're talking about post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. Many people find their way to this particular disease process, this particular diagnosis online. And one of the things that I want everybody to understand here is that this is something that can happen whether or not you know you have had Lyme disease. So sometimes for people, they get into a situation where they have all of these disease processes that are these symptoms that are emerging, and they had Lyme testing and treatment years ago. Other times, people never knew they had Lyme, but they had— they have a similar symptom picture. So in this video, I'm going to talk a little bit about why this happens. How to identify this in you, as well as steps to take to get results, as well as a free quiz to help you know if you likely have this or not. Okay, so let's start with some of the facts and some of the myths and break down some of the things that we see. So when we have post-Lyme treatment syndrome, one of the things, one of the reasons we have this is because the common ways that we are treating Lyme, such as doxycycline. Doxycycline will clear the blood really, really well of Lyme. However, it will also have the Lyme bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi switch and morph into its more dormant form. What this means for many people when they are treated is that they get initial treatment results— of course, not all the time, but much of the time— and when this happens, this can then lead into essentially getting a situation where they feel better, and then years down the road, because Lyme has gone into that dormant form, it will come out of hiding and it'll manifest symptoms. Now, symptoms in this particular situation are going to be oftentimes much different than the original symptoms. Symptoms originally for many people are skin changes, are flu-like symptoms, sometimes joint pain, right? But when it shows up later after re-emerging from its dormant state, which is essentially what's happening— because when we have Lyme go dormant, it can actually re-emerge into its active form. It's usually stress that will trigger this, but exposure to certain toxins such as mold, toxic metals, glyphosate, or other infections such as viral infection, parasitic infections, All of these things will dysregulate the immune system and it can cause something like a stealth pathogen like Lyme to come out of hiding. So the other thing that can happen, and then I'm going to get into some of the symptoms here, but the other thing that can happen with this is some people have Lyme disease and they don't manifest the common symptoms, right? Some people, it just looks like a flu, just looks like an acute type of infection. It resolves on its own. And people don't actually manifest anything that would lead to antibiotic use or lead to treatment when they are bitten. These people, we don't really have— they don't really call them post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome because they never were treated. But the symptoms are going to look the same because what will happen for those people is that the immune system takes care of those active forms. It goes oftentimes into dormancy because the dormant forms have not been treated. And just like with post-Lyme syndrome, then all of a sudden due to stress, due to infections, due to toxins, due to other types of viral or parasitic infections, we see that then that emergence, that Lyme that was in dormancy, that Borrelia that was in dormancy comes out of dormancy. So this can happen because the body self-resolved that acute situation or because we see this with post-Lyme treatment. Right? So within the context of that, then, you know, the next question is, what are the symptoms? So when we have this reemergence, now we have a widespread inflammatory reaction.