Dr. Diane Mueller explains why Lyme disease mimics fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other conditions: Borrelia infections damage nerves, joints, and hormones across multiple body systems. Standard tests miss it 57 to 67 percent of the time and often catch only one Borrelia species while others slip through.
Questions this video answers
"up to around a 57 to a 67% chance of a false negative" (as stated in the video).
Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane, your lymedoc here talking today about Lyme as the great mimicker. So why is Lyme the great mimicker? Lyme is the great mimicker because of the widespread imbalance that it can cause on the body. We see that Lyme and the toxins secreted by the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia can cause our nerve cells to die. They can eat away our joints, it can change our blood flow. Right. They can create Lyme and the borrelia, that is the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, can cause hormonal disrupt regulations, thyroid dysfunction. I've seen so many different things, and because of this, Lyme can look like so many different diseases. It can look like fibromyalgia, can look like chronic fatigue syndrome, it can look like hypothyroidism. It looks, can look like chronic migraines. If certain nerves that go to the gut get attacked, it can cause gastrointestinal problems. And it might look like things like irritable bowel syndrome. Right. So a big keynote thing for if you have Lyme disease or not can be. If you feel like from a conventional standpoint, you need to see a gastroenterologist for your, your gut and your endocrinologist for your hormones and a rheumatologist for your joints and a cardiologist for your heart and your vasculature. Right. If the symptoms are so widespread that it's almost like, hey, conventionally speaking, you would need to see all these different specialists, then we have to take a step back and say, well, what can cause widespread problems like that? Well, things that impact the nerves, things that impact the vasculature can do that. Things that attack so many different organs and glands and tissues, perhaps all at the same time. Lyme disease can do that. So this is one reason that Lyme is called the great mimicker is because it, because of its ability to attack and break down tissues across the body. It also has the subsequent ability to cause widespread symptoms, which means it looks like a lot of different diseases. So we can be misdiagnosed sometimes with other diseases. And we're not looking further because we think we found the answer when it's actually Lyme causing that thing, because it mimics so so many different things. So the big time, like if you just have one symptom, right. So if you just have chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, and no other symptoms, the likelihood that it's probably going to turn out to be driven by Lyme is low. It could be. It absolutely could be. But most of the time with something like Lyme, we do see several areas of the body impacted. So if you're struggling with a, you know, laundry list of different diagnoses and, you know, you have to see all these different doctors for this, these other, all these different diagnoses. This is a time that you might consider, consider that you want to get tested for Lyme. Now remember, not all testing for Lyme is the same. The standard test has up to around a 57 to a 67% chance of a false negative. In addition, standard tests tend to only test for one type of Borrelia or Borrelia burgdorferi, the common bacteria, the most common bacteria that we see causing Lyme disease. So that's classically what we would say is Lyme is caused by this bacteria, Borrelia borgdorferi. Now, however, there's other species of Borrelia. There's Borrelia miyamoti, Borrelia borrelli, Borrelia californiasis, and others. And these other species of Borrelia can still make people very sick and cause a lot of the same symptoms. We just might not classically give that Lyme label in medicine because it's not Borrelia borgarferi. So you really want to make sure when you are, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, do I have Lyme? Well, you want to make sure you get tested. But I would be missed to not bring up the part that not all testing is the same. So you want to make sure you're working with somebody Lyme literate. You can always check out my store where I do have some tests available for people on my store. So there's information on that in the show notes. So please do go and check that out. I hope this has been helpful. Remember, be an advocate for yourself. I've talked about this recently on this channel, the importance of self advocation when it comes to Lyme. So it's really important that you're an advocate for yourself. Please do subscribe and I'll see you in another video.
