Dr. Diane Mueller explains why Lyme disease goes undiagnosed: symptoms like fatigue and brain fog mimic fibromyalgia and long COVID, and standard tests miss other Borrelia species beyond burgdorferi. She proposes that stress and infections can reactivate dormant Lyme bacteria, affecting roughly 14% of patients.
Do you or do you not have Lyme disease? That is a very important question and one that comes up for so many patients because of the continued denial by the medical community that Lyme exists all over the world, largely as well as the fact that the medical community oftentimes denies the existence of chronic Lyme disease. It's estimated in some papers that post-treatment Lyme disease this in about 14% of people. However, statistics like this are really misleading because a lot of people are not even diagnosed correctly with Lyme disease, and they actually have a long-term Lyme disease scenario. So many people are going through gaslighting. Many times Lyme is now with weed. Now that we have long-haul COVID, many times Lyme is really linked to or is really misdiagnosed as long-haul COVID. And it's really interesting because we know with dormant Lyme, we know when somebody has Lyme and it goes into dormancy, that when it manifests, it doesn't oftentimes look like classic Lyme. It can look like fibromyalgia. It can look like chronic fatigue syndrome. It can look at like brain fog or cognitive decline. And so much of the time, those symptoms are also what is happening with long-haul COVID. So a curiosity and a theory that I currently have with long-haul COVID is that I think long-haul COVID is more than just recovering from the viral infection. Of course, there is some element of that recovery, and I'm not denying that, but what I have found in my clinical practice when people come in and report long-haul COVID is that they actually have many other things in their system that have activated. So oftentimes Lyme comes up as positive or other hidden infections. So I believe that what may be happening here is that COVID is— and other viruses, of course, can be these predetermining triggers that are actually creating a scenario where dormant forms of Lyme are actually coming out of dormancy. We know that Lyme goes to its dormant forms in a very, very high rate. So it's not uncommon that stress, that infections, these types of scenarios that create stress on the body, can actually pull that Borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme, out of dormancy. So because of that, I think when we're thinking about chronic symptoms or chronic COVID, we really need to be testing for Lyme disease using proper tests. Remember that Lyme disease is classically caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. However, there are many other species of Borrelia such as our Borrelia miyamotoi, Borrelia californensis, Borrelia afzelii, belly, on and on and on and on. And when we are only using standard tests from our conventional lab testing companies, they are really only looking at Borrelia burgdorferi. So if you happen to have another species of Borrelia which can cause all the same symptoms, guess what? It is going to be missed. This is why proper testing is essential. So I hope this has been helpful. I do want to invite you to take my free quiz at getwellquiz.com. I developed this quiz as a way to help people look to see if there's other things they should be testing for based upon their symptoms. So it's kind of a look into my brain. The test is as a way of saying, okay, well, what are things that you have maybe not been tested for by your doctor that you should start advocating for getting tested based upon your symptoms? So that is a free quiz at getwellquiz.com. And of course, please always subscribe to the channel. This has been helpful so you do not miss any continuing information like this. Thank you so much, and I wish you the best on your healing journey.
What are typical symptoms especially neurological ones for Lyme disease HIGHRES
