Dr. Diane Mueller (Lyme, mold, and chronic illness clinician) explains how Lyme disease affects the body, emphasizing that severity depends on timing of diagnosis, co-infections, host health, and environmental/toxic exposures. She highlights Lyme as a "great mimicker" causing neurologic, digestive, mood, musculoskeletal, autoimmune, and chronic-fatigue/fibromyalgia-like symptoms, warns that standard two-tier testing can miss cases (high false-negative rate), and urges working with a Lyme-literate clinician.
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Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, your Lyme mold and chronic illness expert. Today I'm here talking to you about what does Lyme disease do to you? So the impact of Lyme disease will greatly depend upon a lot of different things. How fast you know you have it, how long it's been in the body, the state of your body when you contracted this, like, were you already sick? As well as a lot of other situations, such as, did you get other infections? When insects bite us, for example, they don't just give us one thing. They give us a cocktail of whatever they're carrying. So some people, when they get bitten, will get just the bacteria Borrelia that causes Lyme. Other people will get a whole host of a cocktail of other types of microorganisms. In addition, oftentimes when we have these chronic infections, we are more suspicious, susceptible to things like environmental toxins building up in our body. We can be more susceptible to autoimmune disease turning on and our thyroid being attacked or our joints being attacked, for example. So it can do so. Lyme can do many different things, but the extent to which it is problematic really depends upon a lot of different factors. This is why working with somebody that is lime literate, that understands the whole body, is really important, because you want to make sure that you're thinking that you have Lyme, or if you've been diagnosed with Lyme, you're also looking at the other infections that are common with Lyme, other toxins, other hormonal imbalances, for example, that really come commonly with Lyme. So Lyme disease is the great mimicker. So it looks like so many different disease processes, which is one reason why it is often missed. Lyme can cause a lot of neurological problems. It can attack the vagus nerve, for example, so that it can impact digestion, mood. I've seen it related to problems such as OCD or adhd. I've seen it related to things like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. So there's a lot of different widespread symptoms that can go away when somebody has Lyme. Now, what I'm talking about most classically is chronic Lyme. Lyme in the acute state for many people, can feel like a sudden onset of arthritis or just like the flu. But we want to remember for many people that they don't get diagnosed when it's acute, and then it can go dormant and hide, and it can look like something very, very different months or years later. So a good time to get tested for Lyme is if you can't figure out what's going on with you. If you've had standard tests and your doctor's like, well, you don't know, everything looks normal and you know you're not, it's a good reason to look for a Lyme. Remember that the standard tests are not that accurate. The two tiered testing, which is the standard test, one study showed that it had up to about a 67% chance of a false negative. So we really want to be careful to make sure you're working with a Lyme loaded doc to get really good lab tests to make sure you're not missing out on some of these things that could be signs or they could be evidence that you have Lyme and it could have been missed. So please do ask your questions here. I'm happy to answer them. It helps me generate more content that is useful for you. So if you ask your questions here, if they I feel like they'll appeal to the group, then I will definitely make you guys more videos on those particular questions. Please do subscribe to my channel so I can get you more information just like this. And thanks so much. I'll see you in another video.
