Robert Whitfield MD explains why mold illness and Lyme disease often coexist. Standard Lyme antibiotics like doxycycline can push Borrelia into a dormant state that hides in the body, and mycotoxin stress can reactivate it later, similar to how shingles emerges after chickenpox.
So, that being said, everybody offline. I had a patient give me a challenging moment this past week. I had to discuss how often she sees mold and Lyme together, because it seems like I'm seeing.
It is so common. We see these things together. I think some of it. There's a couple of different reasons why symptoms from mold illness, the symptoms from Lyme disease can be so similar that one of the things that I find happens so frequently is people get one of these hats put on them diagnostically, and because they have that diagnostic label, nobody has actually then looked for the Lyme or vice versa, because there's this, this symptom similarity. And like you and I were talking on the phone, I also think another component that's happening is we know that Lyme can go dormant. We know that some of the standards of care that we've been using for years, such as doxycycline, amoxicillin, some of these standards of care for Lyme disease, actually will cause the bacteria that creates Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, to, will cause that bacteria to go into this dormant persister form, where it's cleared from the blood, oftentimes feel people feel better, but it's not cleared from the body. And then once their immune system is, say, busy and doing other things, like trying to find the mycotoxins inside the body, it creates enough of an internal stressor that then that Lyme disease that was in that persister dormant form, sometimes from decades ago, strength starts to reemerge. Similarly to somebody with chickenpox getting shingles, but obviously a lot more intense and severe than that.
