When I was first diagnosed with Lyme disease, after almost 30 years of suffering, I reached out to a bunch of folks who were living with Lyme disease to ask for their best advice. I got some wonderful input. A fire hose of input. I narrowed down my approaches by following a combination of my intuition, my best thinking, and a good deal of trial and error. Great stuff came out of that approach, including a cure!!! At the same time there were more than a few duds. 

Intake fatigue, loss of income from Lyme and treatments, as well as hopelessness while treating Lyme are real! Some of these things moved the needle and some did nearly nothing. Yet we can’t know if things will work or not until we try them. So here’s my input.

Top 10 Approaches that Didn’t Work

These are some of the things that I tried that did not work well for me and ended up being a hassle. I know others who rave about these treatments so it just goes to show two things: 1. that you just never know what will work and 2. that everyone is different.

Antibiotics

I was told early on by a friend of a friend to “stay away from Western medicine,” and “antibiotics just drives the Lyme deeper.” I definitely resonated with this advice because of my background in holistic healing and because that was the approach I had taken for most of my life. At the same time I talked to a bunch of folks who felt that antibiotics had saved them, moved them forward, or were crucial in the healing process. In my case they were crucial, but not in the way these folks were suggesting.

I was interested in having an experienced guide in the process and the PA that I chose is Lyme experienced and trained in the Jemsek method which claims to have a 70%+ cure rate. Their approach is to cycle through a dozen or more meds in different combinations to sort of confuse the spirochete, open the biofilms, and keep bombarding for a long time. This approached proved to be devastating on my fragile system. I muscled through it for over a year but then the mouth sores, diarrhea, toxic feeling, and worsening symptoms convinced me to stop. The crucial piece for me is that this approach reminded me that this style of medicine does not work for my system.

Ozone Therapy

On the advice of my Lyme doc I bought an ozone unit complete with oxygen tank, ozone generator, water bubbler, and catheters so that I could do at home insufflations rectally. This system cost over $600 and actually works through the oxidative process quite well. I found that my #1 cure worked better for cheaper. 

Probiotics

Practitioners love to advise ongoing and regular use of probiotics though I’m not sure the science is there to back it up. But as with anything in our culture these days, you can find data to back up any position. I have long been seduced by the promise of probiotics but have never in my life experienced one bit of difference in taking them. For me they have been a waste of time and money. Recently I read an article that suggested there are more variety and quantity of probiotics that enter the system when we take a deep breath in nature then could ever happen by taking a pill. That’s my new approach–to populate my body with good things by being in nature more often.

Fecal transplant

This is an edgy treatment, not to mention messy, smelly, and aesthetically challenging. You take a healthy person’s poo and insert it into your own colon in hopes that it will populate you with all the good stuff from the other person. I went the Do-It-Yourself route for this since I had someone who was willing and going through a medical system would be really expensive. I did pay for the poo donations because my friend processed them and froze them for me. I did 10 enema’s with someone else’s poop over the course of five weeks. I had high hopes for this working partly because it takes a bunch of overcome grossness to get up the nerve to try this. But alas, it did almost nothing. I had some better poop experiences for a minute but ultimately things were not significant changed or improved. 

Medical Intuitive

Because I went for so long without being diagnosed, I was desperate to find out the cause of my suffering. The fantasy of hearing all the details of my inner bodily experience from a deeply intuit person is compelling. I tried two or three of these folks both before diagnosis and after and in all cases decided that my own inner knowing is more spot on. It’s an expensive way to find out things you already know and it’s not super helpful to hear about an energetic signature from your ancestors that might be a contributing factor. In retrospect it’d be better to skip this step.

NAET

Like many long-time Lyme sufferers I developed reactivity to all kinds of things like foods, smells, cold temperatures, and stimulation like lights, sounds, and noises. As I mentioned in my 10 Top Cures for Lyme Disease, I am a proponent of energy medicine, so it just made sense to try this non-invasive approach to treating allergies. By the time I tried this approach I had so much intake fatigue that I literally cried in the practitioner’s office as she was asking me some basic questions. Related to other alternative healing approaches like acupuncture, this treatment is supposed to help the nervous system be less reactive to certain substances. In my experience, even with multiple sessions, I maybe had one day of relief and then went back to reactivity. 

EMF Remediation

I’m really glad I did the EMF assessment in my home because I do think that reducing these added electrical stressors are helpful for overall wellbeing. At the same time, the consult and the remediation were expensive and did nothing to improve my condition, at least not noticeably. I am really grateful that this is not an area where I am overly sensitive.

Supplements

They are endless. Fellow Lymies, you know what I mean! Supplements helped control my symptoms for years. They would beat back a flare so that I could get some instant space from the contracting feeling that would come over me. I’ve done every supplement known to Lyme disease folks and have spent a pretty penny doing so. Top supplements included Oregano Oil, Monolaurin, Gymnema, Berberine, Cloves, Artemisinin, Olive Leaf, Neem, Black Walnut, Liver Cleansers, Wormwood, and Resveratrol. As you can see these are mostly all parasite focused, which makes sense that it would relieve some symptoms. Problem is that I could never take enough of them to make a permanent difference and they’re expensive and tedious to take multiple times a day.

Rife Machine

To be fair, I used a homemade system that did absolutely nothing but waste my time. I have heard that the professional systems are quite different and some folks have experienced miracles with this. In my experience, it wasn’t effective.

Essential Oil Diffuser

These are lovely things to have around as odorizers and mood lifters. I enjoy mine very much and the investment was minimal ($80 for this nebulizer and the cost of essential oils). Sometimes a heavy dose of certain oils would calm my stomach and help lesson the feeling of contraction all over my body, but overall this wasn’t super helpful in curing Lyme disease.

Other Lyme Related Articles

Please see the following articles also related to Lyme disease:

• My Top 10 Cures for Lyme Disease
• My MMS protocol for Curing Lyme Disease
• The energetic signature of Lyme Disease