What Does Lyme Disease Do to Your Body?

Hey everybody, Dr. Diane Mueller, Lyme and mold expert here, talking about Lyme disease today and what it does to the body. So Lyme is the great mimicker. So what it does to the body is widespread. We know it can affect the heart, causing conditions like myocarditis and heart inflammation. We know it can impact the nerves, causing nerve cell death and neurological problems where we're getting numbness or tingling or these paresthesias type of episodes. We know it can cause things like dysautonomia where it's the immune— the, the nervous system does not work correctly and the signals for pumping blood, for keeping our blood pressure up, become dysfunctional. And we can get POTS, we can get these symptoms where we get very dizzy, we have vertigo. We know because it degrades hyaluronic acid, which lives in our eyes and our joints. And Lyme loves the hyaluronic acid. It's what it eats. It's food. It's a snack, right? And so Lyme will just go around the body eating up all our hyaluronic acid. And it might— the Lyme might move then from our shoulder one day to the knee one day to our hip the other day because it's eating our hyaluronic acid. It can cause just such a widespread inflammation in the body and even in parts of the brain. That people wind up getting anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, migraines, and headaches. So the biggest, say, systems that are affected are the nervous system, the immune system, the cardiac system, right? But then there's so many other components. Like Lyme can attack the vagus nerve, which regulates digestion, so we can see digestion impacted. So Lyme's the great mimicker. So we're really talking about what it causes. It's of these things. Now, this is a lot of information, and one of the things that is so common to happen with Lyme disease is the stress of figuring this out. The stress on your body from going through this can take over, and we can get into this vicious thought cycle with the mind. So I invite you to hear all this and then also take a deep breath. Take a deep breath and remember that these symptoms are just cues for you. They're just, they're just like these flags, right? Or these flags that are saying, hey, right turn here, left turn here, it's check engine light, something's out of balance. And so when we have these symptoms, it's scary as heck, but there are these symptoms or flags that say, hmm, something's not right, fix this. And so follow these flags. And the flags will help with treatments. They will help to say if the treatment's not working, it might be that you're missing something and there's another piece of the puzzle. One of the biggest things that's so difficult to achieve but so important is when you're feeling like this, to work to keep your nervous system as calm as possible. So taking deep breaths, feeling the chair beneath you, right? Really trying to keep yourself calm because adrenaline, cortisol, these types of stress hormones actually will make Lyme communicate with each— with itself better, with the different microorganisms of Lyme, and will help let Lyme spread and proliferate more and more. And we don't want that. So the more we can keep ourselves calm, which believe me, as a Lyme survivor, I know this is way easier said than done, but it really can make such a difference with the treatment and, uh, the results that you can get. So please do subscribe to this channel to get more information, helpful information like this. Please do share this information with your friends and family. Don't keep me a secret, and I'll see you in another video.