Dr. Diane Mueller (Lyme clinician and survivor) explains persister cells in Borrelia (Lyme) — dormant bacterial forms that do not change their DNA and are not killed by standard antibiotics, and which can later 'wake up' to cause recurrence. She notes doxycycline may push bacteria into dormancy, recommends the herb Cryptolepis for targeting persister cells, and emphasizes stress-resilience (nervous-system retraining, breathwork, visualization, brain retraining programs) to prevent reactivation. The video closes with a clinic call-to-action (free evaluation) and subscription request.
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Hey everybody. In this video we're going to talk about persister cells with Lyme disease which are hugely related to why Lyme disease recurs. And we want to help you get out of recurrence, right? We need to avoid this at a hundred percent. I'm Dr. Diane Mueller, Lyme disease expert, Lyme disease survivor. And persister cells are a very unique part to Lyme disease. There's a few other bacteria, so remember that Lyme is caused by the bacteria Borrelia Borgdor eye and how a lot of bacteria work. A lot of bacteria work in this way where they become antibiotic resistance, right? And when they do that, their DNA changes, etc. Etc. Persister cells, Lyme, Lyme can become antibiotic resistance for sure, but persister cells are cells of Lyme that do not change their id, their DNA, that persist over time, that do not respond to antibiotics. So one of the things that we see with things like doxycycline, that is a very common first line standard of care conventionally for Lyme disease, one of the things we see is that doxycycline can put more cells into dormancy and also does not work against these long term resistant persister cells. So when people are treated sometimes with antibiotic therapy, one of the things that will happen is they might feel, feel a lot better because we're killing that blood, that superficial level of Lyme. We are definitely killing some huge amounts of bacteria. But if we are converting the bacteria into these persister cells, then what happens is you feel better, classically speaking, going through a stressful type of response and all of a sudden the Lyme comes back, right? And that's because these persister cells are woken up out of dormancy, they multiply, then you have a problem again. So there's really two main things as far as takeaways from a prevention of recurrence standpoint that are important to mention. One, the herb Crypto Lepus performs the best in research at getting at these persister cells. So I'm a big fan of herbal treatment for Lyme disease. I do use antibiotics sometimes, but most of the time I use herbs because I find that there's less rates of recurrence, there's less damage to the immune system, to the microbiome which composes so much of our immune system. Regardless though, if you use antibiotics or herbal medicine, I really encourage you to talk to your prescriber about adding in Cryptolepis as an herb to get after those persister cells. The other thing that is super important is managing stress and learning to become more stress resilient, which we do by training our nervous system. The thing with Lyme and all the co infections that go with it is it's in survival state. And what does your body do in survival state? It goes into fight or flight. That's natural. It's normal. There's nothing wrong with you. Your body is trying to survive. And when your body is in this fight or flight survival, kicking out chemicals, kicking out inflammatory molecules, it's not in a state where it's sending the signal to the body to heal, to prepare, to rest, to rest and heal like you really need. Right. So we want to help the nervous system to be transformed and we do that in part by working on stress resiliency. So this can be through visualization, through breath work, through a lot of other modalities out there. DNRs, Gupta. We do a lot of brain retraining in our practice, and the idea with these techniques is to get your brain out of that sympathetic state standpoint, out of that fight or flight, and into healing. So this is a huge part also of preventing Lyme recurrence, which is really in preventing waking up of any dormant persister cells. So I hope this has helped you understand this. We do. We are taking active clients in my practice at my lymedoc. There's information in the show notes about how to get a free health evaluation. Call with my team. And that's it for now. Please do subscribe if this has been helpful. Share me with your friends and family. Please don't keep me a secret. See you next time.
