For those patients suffering from Chronic Lyme Diseas in the northeast and northern midwest, this is for you. For those that are treating themselves with months of antimicrobial drugs against the Borrelia bacterium that causes Lyme disease, you need to think twice. It has never made sense to me to give a patient months and months of antimicrobial medicines in the absence of active known infection. The side effects of the antibiotics are profound, especially on the intestinal microbiome.

In a recent study in PNAS, Dr. Jutras and colleagues noted that there is a remnant part of the bacterial cell wall that persists in the human tissue, causing a persistent inflammatory immune response that we see as joint, brain, heart inflammation. The Borrelia bacterium is long gone but the persistent cell wall debris is being recognized by our immune system as if the microbe was still present and wreaking havoc.

The only way to fix this problem is to down-regulate the immune inflammatory response by way of nutritional therapy, stress reduction and targeted anti-inflammatory herbs and medicines.
Antibiotics in the long run are going to make you worse off, not better.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/27/13498

Dr. M

Dr. Chris Magryta is a physician at Salisbury Pediatric Associates. Contact him at newsletter@salisburypediatrics.com