Dr. Diane Mueller, a Lyme disease specialist and survivor, shares five ways to avoid tick bites: tuck pants into socks, use permethrin, drink cistus tea, hike when it's below 40°F, and send any tick you find to a testing service like Tickology to check for infection.
Hey everybody, Dr. Diane Mueller, Lyme and mold expert here, talking about the top 5 tips to help avoid Lyme disease. So one of the first easy ones is just avoid going out into the great outdoors. I say that kind of humorously because anybody that's watching this video probably is an outdoor lover like me, and I just can't stop. Even as a Lyme survivor, I'm still going to go outside because that's what restores me, right? So how do we avoid it? So truthfully, the first thing to do is make sure you don't have skin exposed. So if you're especially in a Lyme endemic area— but remember, Lyme isn't everywhere. My Lyme doc practices in Colorado, which has been said by many not to have Lyme disease. I treat so many cases of Lyme disease here in Colorado. So it's everywhere. It spreads. There are areas of the country and area of the world where there, of course, is more Lyme disease. But we do really want to be careful everywhere. So we can do things like, you know, put our little nerd hat on and tuck our socks into our— tuck our, our pants into our socks, pull our socks real high so there's no space. There's no, like, ability for these ticks to crawl underneath our pants. Right. So that's one good thing to do. Another thing we can do is we can spray ourselves with, with permethrin. So this pesticide has been shown to be super anti-Lyme, but I'm personally a little bit concerned from a toxic standpoint about other health side effects of it. So I'd be very careful about that. But research has shown where people are walking through this field where there's a lot of ticks, right? And one person in these studies will be— and I don't know who these volunteers for these studies, but one person in the study, for example, will be covered in no permethrin. And with that person, that person will be covered with ticks. The other person does use this particular product and they will have practically no ticks on them. So it is really effective, but it also makes me really nervous. So, but that is an option. You can drink a lot of cistus tea. Cistus has a very anti-Lyme effect and can sometimes help lower that amount of the likelihood of when, if you're in an endemic area, to be bitten. You can make sure that you are hiking predominantly or doing outdoor sports more in the winter. Ticks start to go dormant in activity around 40°F. So if you're hiking when it's a little bit cooler than that and save your hikes in the great outdoors for some of those cooler days, that can certainly really help. And finally, get a tick remover. So tick removers are small tools. You can find them on Amazon. They help to remove a tick very easily and seamlessly and help you remove a tick correctly. And so the third, the fi— that final thing is really about making sure that if you do find a tick, that you're checking yourself, that you're removing it right away, and then take that tick and send it to a company like Tickology. There's a few tick company tests out there where you can package up your tick if you got bit, send it in, and they will actually test it for you to tell you if the tick contained Lyme disease if they contain any other diseases, because even if you don't feel symptoms from Lyme after being bitten, you really want to consider that you could still have Lyme disease. Because for some people it might look super easy, like a cold or a flu, no big deal, but it can still cause a lot of inflammation in the body, and years later it could manifest as a much worse disease because it can come in and out of hiding. So those are some of the top tips to avoid a tick bite, or if you get bit by a tick, to avoid Lyme disease. So I hope this helps. Please do share this information with your friends and your family. Remember, ticks are everywhere. There's a limited amount of studies that's showing that we can even see Lyme in mosquitoes and fleas. This is very limited, so the predominance of this is not really known yet, but it is possible. So we all get bitten by insects. Definitely want to protect yourself. Definitely drink that cistus tea. And again, please don't keep me a secret. And I will see you in another video.
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