Dr. Diane Mueller explains post-treatment care for people recovering from Lyme disease, highlighting that Lyme can enter dormant/persister states after antibiotics and later flare with stress. She gives a two-part approach: (1) improve stress resiliency (breathwork, visualization, meditation) and (2) rebuild and repair physiology — especially the microbiome and hormone reserves (thyroid and adrenal support). She advises repairing leaky gut, restoring prebiotics/probiotics balance, and obtaining more complete thyroid labs (free T3, free T4, reverse T3, thyroid antibodies) rather than relying only on TSH.
Questions this video answers
Free T3 and free T4 (also mentions reverse T3 and thyroid antibodies as useful markers).
TSH is a brain hormone that signals the thyroid to work; measuring TSH alone may miss thyroid hormone dysfunction.
Chapters
Hey everybody. In this video, we're going to talk about what to do after Lyme disease treatment. I'm Dr. Diane, you are Lyme and mold expert. And this is a really important topic because Lyme disease actually has a high rate of recurrence and some of this may be due to antibiotics if you choose to go that route. While they will clear Lyme from the blood oftentimes very well, they can cause Lyme to convert into dormant and persister cells, which we talk about in another video. So make sure, subscribe to the channel to get all of those kind of videos. But really the biggest thing, you guys with Lyme disease and treatment with antibiotics is when you, when they convert to these persister cells or these dormant cells, you wind up feeling a lot better. And typically people think they're done and then all of a sudden stress happens and then Lyme flares. Right? And the biggest thing with this, this is two, this is a 2.0, a two part answer of what we do. One is we want to do techniques that help us with stress resiliency. We want to do our breath works, we want to do all of our visualizations and meditations and calming type of activities. Those are really important for stress. We also want to rebuild and repair. And that's a huge post treatment thing that people forget about. So whether you've done antibiotic therapy from a conventional standpoint, whether you've used her herbs and done it from a more natural perspective, oftentimes the microbiome, the good bacteria in our body, become very impacted, even just from having Lyme disease itself. But often the treatments come, you know, comprise a part of why the, the microbiome is dysregulated. The microbiome makes up so much of our immune system. So when you are in a situation where your microbiome is hurt and your immune system's hurt, the. Then your immune system's not able to keep Lyme in that dormant state. So it's important post treatment, post Lyme treatment that you're fixing your gut, that you're healing leaky gut, that you're building up your microbiome. Remember, with building the microbiome, you always want to make sure to add the prebiotics, which are the food for probiotics. Your fibers, you know, your, your good fibers work really well for that. In addition to that, you want to make sure that you are considering other things that got destroyed with treatment, which oftentimes can be the thyroid gland, the adrenal glands, those, these types of glands that are producing Hormones to give you energy to help with anti inflammatory processes. Oftentimes these hormones become impacted negatively through Lyme, through Lyme treatment. So building up those stores, building up those reserves is another huge pull post treatment component that you want to make sure you're doing to prevent recurrence. Now, oftentimes when it comes to these types of labs, people are not getting full lab values, right? So typically for the thyroid, for example, people come in and they just have TSH measured or and let me take a step back, TSH is a brain hormone that is telling the thyroid to work. So if all you've done is have TSH run, then you're not actually looking at thyroid hormone, you're looking at the brain hormone. And we can have situations that the brain hormone is perfectly normal and the thyroid is just not responding. That feedback loop has really been turned off. So you want to make sure you measure the thyroid hormones, free T3 and free T4. Other types of good thyroid markers are things like reverse T3 thyroid antibodies. So these types of tests, sometimes you can get your doctor to run, sometimes it's very difficult. If you're having a difficult time getting your doctor to run these, check out the link for purchasing labs direct to consumer in your show notes because that will really help you with being able to find these labs yourself and to get these labs run if your doctor is not going to run them for you. So really think post treatment, whether it's acute or chronic, you want to make sure you're really repairing that microbiome, getting your hormone levels really balanced and supporting the microbiome because that's such a huge part of your immunity in order to get you the results that you're looking for. All right, everybody, we'll see you in the next one.
