Dr. Diane Mueller explains Lyme disease, a bacterial infection caused by Borrelia burgdorferi that's spreading beyond New England to Colorado and across the U.S. Standard tests miss it in up to 67% of cases, and the bacteria's attraction to hyaluronic acid causes pain to migrate between joints. Ticks are the main vector, though mosquitoes and fleas may also spread it.
Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Diane Mueller Mueller, Lyme and mold expert out of Colorado in the United States, and I'm here to tell you about what is Lyme disease and why it's on the rise. I'm particularly telling you that I am in Colorado because the number of times I've seen clients that have never left the state of Colorado and test positive for Lyme is too high to count. I have clients that have found ticks in their yard and gotten bitten and got Lyme disease and have sent their tick in, and sure Sure enough, there's Lyme there. So we got to get out of this thought that Lyme disease is something that is just in the New England states of the United States. This is simply not true. In fact, we know that Lyme disease, which is technically a very severe bacterial infection— so Lyme disease occurs when we get transmitted a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. This particular bacteria, this particular microorganism. It's found oftentimes in ticks. That's where we've identified it most commonly, but there's very limited studies also showing it in mosquitoes and fleas. And we see studies, for example, of songbirds that when they fly around, they carry the larvae of infected ticks and they just drop the larvae down and wherever they might fly, guess what? They are spreading Lyme disease. So maybe that, well, we do know that in the New England states in Lyme, Connecticut was where Lyme was first found and possible even that, that for a while there was no Lyme in other parts of the country of the United States and of the world. But now we know that is not true. So Lyme disease, the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, very similar in nature to the bacteria that causes syphilis. And like syphilis, what can happen is Lyme disease can go in through these stages. Many people get a bullseye rash in the beginning, but many people do not. For some people, the initial stage of Lyme disease might just look like a flu or some sort of basic sickness. The Lyme can then go dormant in the body, and just like syphilis, it can actually come into more aliveness, right? It can come out of dormancy later on, and later on it can cause a wide variety of neurological problems as well as things like joint Lyme loves to live on our hyaluronic acid. It loves, loves, loves, loves this as a food source for it. So sometimes you'll find that Lyme will migrate from a joint. So you might have shoulder pain one day and knee pain another, hip pain another, and it's like, what the heck is going on? Well, the bacteria is very mobile, and so it can travel throughout our body very quickly, and it's traveling to different joints oftentimes because that's where its food source is. So if it's eating up all the hyaluronic acid in your knee one day, your knee might hurt, and then it might migrate to your shoulder to take a nibble of your hyaluronic acid there. Super duper gross, I know, but this is what's happening. So if you are experiencing symptoms that are similar to Lyme, such as— and especially when I'm talking about chronic Lyme— such as migrating joint pain, such as headaches, such as weird neurological symptoms, chronic fatigue syndrome, right? And you can't figure out what is going on, you want to make sure that you get Lyme tested. And you want to get Lyme tested by a Lyme literate doctor because not all Lyme tests are the same. The standard of care uses a Lyme test that oftentimes has been shown to have up to a 67% chance of a false negative. They did just recently release a different version of that test which has a 10% improvement. So maybe depending upon your doctor, you might be more in the target range of a whopping 57% chance of a false negative. Point being, you want to work with somebody that understands this diagnosis, that understands how to diagnose it, how to run the right lab test, how to interpret the lab test, and make sure that you are ruling it in and out once and for all. So that is something that we do at our clinic. You can get information about our clinic and working with us in the show notes. If this has been helpful, please do subscribe so I can get you more information just like this coming out very soon. Thanks again for watching. I hope this has been helpful. I'll see you in another video.
What are typical symptoms especially neurological ones for Lyme disease HIGHRES
