Dr. Diane Mueller, a Lyme specialist, explains why Lyme disease mimics other conditions and describes its neurological symptoms: brain fog, confusion, tremors, and migratory joint pain. The Borrelia bacterium colonizes tissues throughout the body and can infiltrate the brain. Lyme often goes undiagnosed when standard labs are normal or symptoms span multiple organ systems.
We're talking today about what are typical symptoms, especially neurological ones like brain fog, etc., when it comes to Lyme disease. So one of the things to understand about Lyme is that Lyme disease is the great mimicker. And for those that don't know me, my name is Dr. Diane Mueller Mueller. I'm a Lyme and mold expert, 15 years into practice. Now with Lyme disease, Lyme disease can live in various parts of our body, but it particularly loves, loves, loves hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is one of its food sources. So Lyme does love to congregate in places like the joints and the eyes where we have hyaluronic acid. So it's very common for people to have migrating joint pain, strange eye symptoms, uh, visual disturbances, that sort of thing. Now, that being said, Lyme also loves to attack the nerves. We see that Lyme and the Borrelia is really what we're talking about. Borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme, can get into the brain. The toxins that it produces can get into the brain, and we can even see some studies that are showing that the brain may even try to create plaques to trap the Lyme or to trap the toxin. And of course, these Plaques can go very, very wrong and over time can actually cause things like Alzheimer's for people. So because of the ability of both Borrelia, which is the bacteria that causes Lyme, as well as the toxins that Borrelia creates— because these two things can really go after nerves, for example— this is one of the reasons why people have a huge amount of confusion confusion and a huge amount of disorientation and a huge amount of brain fog and fatigue, right? Also why people can have strange movement disorders with Lyme, twitches, these sorts of things. Now, if you're listening to some of this and you're like, well, I don't have those things, that does not mean that you don't have Lyme, because again, Lyme can look like migraines, Lyme can look like chronic pain, Lyme can look like in insomnia. There's so many different areas Lyme can affect. The digestive tract, because it affects the vagal nerve. And so because of that, we can have all sorts of widespread symptoms from Lyme. So it is truly the great mimicker. And so when you test for Lyme, right, so it's like, if it can look like so many things, then when do you test for it? Well, here's a few things to think about when you're testing. If you've done standard conventional tests for— let's say you have chronic fatigue, for example. If you've done standard tests such as look at your thyroid, look at micronutrient levels, look at the adrenal function, and you've done these standard tests and yet you find that you are not, uh, finding anything that's abnormal in the test, or if you start treatments and the treatments aren't really making a difference for you, that is a huge reason to start start thinking about something like Lyme, because anytime we have symptoms, there's always a reason, right? There's always a reason, and it's almost never in your head. Like, I hate when doctors tell people that, because diagnosis, 99.9% of the time, it's not going to be in your head if you're experiencing a symptom right now. Of course, we— their power of placebo is huge. The power of fear is huge. So those things can play a role. But if you feel like you're sick and intuitively you feel like something is off, trust your intuition, number one. Now, when it comes to thinking about when else to test for Lyme, another huge reason and another huge time to test for Lyme is going to be if you have symptoms in multiple parts of your body. So what I mean is, if you were going to go to conventional doc because maybe you have joint pain and you have headaches and you have constipation or you have bloating. Well, in conventional medicine, they're going to send you to probably a neurologist for the migraines, a rheumatologist for the joint pain, and a gastroenterologist for the, the digestive issues. So if you're in a situation where standardly in conventional medicine they would wind up sending you to multiple different doctors because there's multiple parts of your body being involved, This is a huge, huge, huge red flag for something like Lyme because Lyme disease is going to attack a variety parts of the body all at once. So it can look like many disease processes. If you have chronic fatigue and zero other symptoms, then it does not tend to be as likely to be Lyme because Lyme tends to be a little more proliferative. It tends to cause multiple things around the body at one time. Because it attacks multiple parts of the body. So that's how you can start to think about when you should test for this and what is typical. Now, joint and muscle pain oftentimes is migratory, for example, like, so that means it's in the knee one day, the shoulder the next day, et cetera, et cetera. But that's textbook. This does not mean that this is how it has to be at any or at all the time. So you want to make sure that you are really consistent considering, hey, wow, these— some of these things are textbook and you'll read about them online. What you really need to consider is, are you stuck in your treatment? Are things not working? Do you know something's wrong? And do you have multiple parts of the body involved? Now, I encourage you to listen to other videos on my channel because another thing that looks a lot like Lyme is mold illness. So if you go to the mold illness playlist on my channel, you'll learn a lot about mold and many times, in fact, in my practice, I find most of the time people have both Lyme and mold illness at the same time. And if you just treat one without the other, it's not going to get you better. So make sure you check that out as well. Also, go take my free quiz at getwellquiz.com. At that quiz, you will find the ability to take this free quiz and then you'll get information on what lab tests you might be missing from your doctor. What you need to do to advocate for yourself, and just a little bit of help and support to get you proper testing. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
