"I think probably the most difficult thing
Lyme patients have to deal with is the lack of understanding in the
medical community and how they're treated by the medical community. So
many of them are told it's all in their heads. So many of them are
misdiagnosed. So many of them are told that after they do a regular
course of antibiotics they should be well, and if they aren't, well,
then that's their problem, it's something wrong with them, mentally."
"Healing Lyme: Natural Healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis And Its Coinfections" by Stephen Harrod Buhner
From Amazon's product description of the book:
"Despite Centers for Disease Control estimates that only 20,000 new Lyme
disease infections occur each year, the true figure, as Harvard medical
school researchers have found, nearly approaches 200,000. Symptoms run
from mild lethargy to severe arthritis to incapacitating mental
dysfunction. And despite medical pronouncements to the contrary,
extensive research has found that tests for the disease are not very
reliable and antibiotics are only partially effective; up to 35 percent
of those infected will not respond to treatment or will relapse. The
spirochetes that cause Lyme are stealth pathogens—they can hide within
cells or alter their form so that antibiotics cannot affect them. Lyme
disease is, in fact, a potent, emerging epidemic disease for which
technological medicine is only partially effective.
Healing Lyme
examines the leading, scientific research on Lyme infection, its tests
and treatments, and outlines the most potent herbal medicines and
supplements that offer help—either alone or in combination with
antibiotics—for preventing and healing the disease. It is the essential
guide to Lyme infection and its treatment. "
Katryna found this great site on Lyme Disease called Lyme Disease Research Database, which had the following interview posted:
Herbal
Alternatives to Antibiotics in Treating Lyme Disease
Stephen Harrod
Buhner is a master herbalist, psychotherapist and award-winning author
of
ten books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment,
and herbal medicine. His 2005 book, Healing Lyme, examines the research
done on the disease and is considered an essential guide to
understanding Lyme infection and its treatment. The book offers an
herbal protocol for treating Lyme that can be used in conjunction with
antibiotics and other protocols. I spoke with Stephen on November 30,
2006.
Okay, hi. We're here with
Stephen Harrod Buhner, and you are the author of Healing Lyme: Natural
Healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis and Its Coinfections.
I am. Thanks for having me
here.
You're welcome. Well, I wanted to
know, I know you did extensive research on this disease going into the
book, and that you also are known as a person who focuses on herbal and
alternative medicine. Did you have a feeling about Lyme patients
themselves, and what is the most important thing for them to know?
Well,
the primary thing that I, it's a kind of a complicated, when you get
into Lyme you're dealing with a very complicated thing. It's not like
any other disease system I've ever worked with. And the main reason
that I say that is because of how the conservative mainstream medical
community approaches Lyme.
I mean, I'm used to
them not thinking very expansively about disease, and I'm used to them
not thinking very much about wellness, and so that part was true, but
the most difficult part was they have such a strange mindset about Lyme
disease they almost seem to view the whole Lyme community as an enemy
rather than as a group of people that needs help. So, oddly enough, by
the end of focusing so extensively on Lyme and looking at it the
primary that I got to at the end, the most important thing for Lyme
patients is an acknowledgment of the kind of condition that they've
got.
I think probably the most difficult thing
Lyme patients have to deal with is the lack of understanding in the
medical community and how they're treated by the medical community. So
many of them are told it's all in their heads. So many of them are
misdiagnosed. So many of them are told that after they do a regular
course of antibiotics they should be well, and if they aren't, well,
then that's their problem, it's something wrong with them, mentally.
And,
so that's the primary thing that I found that was most essential in the
book. And one of the biggest challenges in the book was
writing it in such a way that the disease is demystified, that the
adversarial-ness that is so present in medical treatment about it was
removed. And yet, at the same time, I kind of had standing behind me as
I wrote the book three people: a conservative medical physician, a
conservative alternative medicine practitioner and an activist Lyme
patient.
I wanted to try to get the book to
approach all three, because one of the primary things I wanted to do
was just give really good in-depth information about the disease so
that it just wasn't so grandiose anymore and that physicians could
actually use it to educate themselves. So anyway, that's the primary
thing that I really felt was necessary for Lyme patients was somebody
who said yes, this is a real condition, it works because of this, and
it's not all in your head.
I have to say,
as a person struggling with Lyme, I really dug into those parts where
you describe in detail for the lay-person how the Lyme bacteria does
its thing. At first I thought, uh-oh, here's comes the gross-out
factor, I don't know if I'm ready for this, you know, graphic
descriptions of what's going on. But it was fascinating to read about
how the spirochete behaves. How long did it take you to learn about the
spirochete, and how did you learn about the life cycle of the
spirochete?
Well what I did was, and
that's another area that was kind of odd for me, in that, I reviewed
about a thousand articles, peer-reviewed scientific journal articles on
Lyme disease, and the spirochete. And especially helpful was the
tremendous work that the epidemiologists have done, and they're almost
the only people whose work I found had no political agenda at all. I
mean, the medical physicians have a tremendous political agenda, which
affects their work.
So, I have the luxury, because
of the way I've designed my life, is when something interests me, I can
devote myself full time to it. And Wendy Leffel, the physician that
wrote the foreward, that's one of the things she mentioned, is that as
a physician she's just to busy to research Lyme and there's no
definitive text on Lyme disease, in print in the world. Mine comes the
closest, which it shouldn't. I mean, there should be an extremely good,
very complex medical research text on it and there's just not.
So,
I was able to take off pretty much a year of time, and devote myself
completely and utterly to studying the Lyme spirochete, what it does,
and to read every piece of research that I could get my hands on, and
so up to the moment the book went to print, I was able to do that. And
of course, there's going to continue to be new material coming out, but
basically I immersed myself in the study of the spirochete and what it
does in the body and I pretty much didn't do anything else for about a
year.
Well, it comes through in the clear
descriptions. I have to think, when we have such an ancient organism,
the spirochete has been around forever, and yet so little is still
known about it. And you mentioned that there were six things, you name
six things that you discovered about Lyme after a long and intensive
search. You discovered there is something very strange going on with
Lyme disease. I wondered what do you think that is? I haven't finished
the book yet, so forgive me.
Well,
primarily, it's that it's the first, well, I didn't actually study
AIDS, that came out, and I haven't done much work on that, that came
out, the recognition of AIDS in the late 70s. It was called the
“gay flu” for awhile, and all kinds of strange
names because they didn't know what it was.
The
major thing that's really strange about it is that there's such
incredibly good research information from epidemiologists and other
researchers about the spirochete, and what it does, and how it acts,
and everything, and nevertheless, the mainstream medical community is
completely, for the most part, unaware of any of that research. They
don't know anything about it, so there's this huge disconnect between
the research arm of medical practice and the medical practitioners
themselves. And that is very strange.
The only
other disease where I'm aware that that occurred is with AIDS, and
there's still significant problems within certain parts of AIDS
treatment and research that there's a huge disconnect.
But
in Lyme it's phenomenal, you've got, what, 200,000 people a year
becoming infected. The diagnosis rates are extremely low. And the
diagnosis dynamics themselves are extremely poor. Treatment outcomes
for this disease are extremely poor using antibiotics. I tend to think
of it as roughly about 50% of the people that take antibiotics will get
well, but that's only 50% of the people that are diagnosed, and
diagnosis is not even at 50% of those infected.
And
the doctors are completely and utterly as a group, hostile, to
understanding Lyme and its treatment. And that doesn't make any sense
to me. I mean, why this disease? And why that incredibly strong,
knee-jerk response? It doesn't make sense that the research is there,
but nevertheless it's not been put into comprehensive form, and the
doctors just basically don't want to know about it. And I find that
extremely strange.
Then at the same time, they've
got this massive group of ill people who say, “No I still
don't feel right. Something's wrong.” And doctors
as an entire group are saying, “Well, that's your fault. It
doesn't have anything to do with us.” That just doesn't make
sense to me.
You talk about, in your book,
that it's okay for patients to use your protocols and use the herbs
that you explain very well in the book along with antibiotics, if
they're using those. But you don't talk very much about other
alternative therapies, and I wondered about the dangers. Is it okay for
patients to use your protocols while they're on other types of
protocols?
There isn't any reason that
I'm aware of that somebody with Lyme who is using Rife machines for
instance, or any of the other different approaches, can't use the
protocol at the same time. There's a kind of a thing, and I think that
it tends to come mostly from exposure to conservative medical practice.
Oh, get off of everything else, there's no telling what that's doing
and just do the antibiotics.
The United States is
the only country on earth where this kind of fear about different
medical approaches is so incredibly rampant. It's not true in Europe,
it's not true in China, certainly, in Asia, it's not true in Africa. So
it's this one country where we've been trained to do that and I think
that kind of uncertainty translates across in a lot of different areas.
So, as far as I know at this point, and I have
fairly extensive exposure to people doing a lot of different things,
there's no reason why you can't do pretty much whatever you want along
with the protocol. I note contraindications for the herbs along with
pharmaceutical protocol in there, but it shouldn't interact in any
strange way with any other protocol people use.
That's
good. Okay. It's interesting about the United States being the only
country who uses antibiotics to the extent that we do. I talk to a lot
of doctors and health care practitioners. Some of them seem to,
especially the ones who are in the alternative fields, really feel like
there's sort of an awakening going on. Do you see any other evidence of
that? An awakening in mainstream medicine? Or do you feel that Lyme
patients just doomed to fight this battle that we chose simply because
we got sick?
Well, the thing about people
that use other healing approaches than technological medicine. We see
three primary types, well maybe four primary types of people:
People
with colds and flu, because technological medicine doesn't work well
with that. Women's reproductive problems, because technological
medicine doesn't work well with that. People with long-term chronic
disease conditions, because pharmaceuticals don't usually work well
with that. And people with terminal diseases such as cancer, because
pharmaceutical medicine sometimes doesn't work well with
that.
So, we become the
treatment group of last resort, and in a way, we should really be the
treatment group of first resort like we are in many other cultures. So
all of these groups tend to be fairly active, they're activists, each
of them in their own way. Women probably have been the largest initial
group of people who said, this is not right, this whole technological
stuff is not working. And they, there's a huge alternative community or
subculture, you might say, of women using specific protocols. The AIDS
activists were another group, and they came up with a lot of tremendous
things. Within cancer, the cancer subculture is extremely active. But
probably, at this time, the most active of all is the Lyme community.
And,
you know, what of course what I would love to see, is if the United
States just shifted their approach. When you look at health care, we
spend more on health care than any other culture on earth and our
outcomes are about half as good as, for instance in Sweden and Norway
and many of the countries in Europe.
What we do
doesn't work, so what it really comes down to is, you just have to
follow the money. The pharmaceutical companies make a huge amount of
money off of Americans and our health is not the better for it. We're
basically bankrupting ourself. And I think, because of that, because of
the poor outcomes and the high expense, there is a definite awakening
going on throughout the country, but it's a long hard process, as it is
with any fundamental change in a culture, and we're just going to have
to keep working at it. Because the pharmaceutical companies, they have,
what, one representative for every three physicians or something like
that in the United States. They spend billions of dollars.
They're
the most powerful lobbying group.
Yes,
and we don't have the money, and who wants to spend their life doing
that? That's not why we do this kind of work. So, it's a slow,
grassroots process. And it's people like the people with Lyme who
decide to inform themselves and form support groups, and really create
some sort of an alternative approach, that is more respectful of their
dignity as human beings that have a particular illness, and that is
what really drives the whole thing.
It's
wonderful to hear you put it that way, because as you're speaking I'm
realizing, and I know that I'm not alone, you do feel like you're being
reduced in every way when you deal with the medical community with this
disease. Not recognized to begin with, and then reduced once you are
recognized. I have found that the Internet is an extremely powerful
tool, for good and for bad, but especially for organizing. One of the
things that I know has been organized over the Internet for Lyme
disease patients is this rally of protest that is going on today, in
fact, against the new guidelines that were posted that the infectious
disease society created. Are you aware of that protest?
Actually
I haven't seen those new guidelines yet.
Okay.
Well, they're simply saying that Lyme can be cured with a short-term of
antibiotics, and that long-term Lyme or what they're calling post-Lyme
Syndrome, or chronic Lyme, is still very much in question, and that
Lyme can be cured with I think it's a 14 – 28 day protocol of
antibiotics. And also, that it must be diagnosed by two specific
things: the blood-test and the bullseye rash. And in your book you talk
about the bullseye rash only showing up on about 37%, is that right?
Did I get that right?
Yes, it's about a
third. Thirty-seven percent, somewhere around in there. And these
supposed new guidelines you're discussing, they're aren't new. That's
pretty much what the CDC's been saying all along. I mean, they've
extended it a little bit, I think their original thing was a ten-day
course of antibiotics, so they've extended it to 28 days. But this is
one of the things that I was talking about that I find so tremendously
frustrating, is that the peer-reviewed journal articles themselves that
looked at long-term Lyme infection.
These studies
are old and there are scores of them. And they basically found that,
yeah, you can get up to maybe, with some antibiotics what they look at
is a 95% cure rate. And that sounds really good on the surface. But
then you look at it and they're showing a 35% relapse rate in those
groups. So, what they're looking at is only about a 60%, at the best, a
60% cure rate with antibiotics.
Now, I think
that's good. Lyme is a, can be a tremendously debilitating disease, and
it's one of the few diseases I really think an alternative protocol and
an antibiotic protocol work really well together because their going to
maximize the outcomes, alright? But their failure to recognize that
they're only going to get about a 60% cure rate with antibiotics, based
on exhaustive studies that their own community has themselves produced,
is unbelievable.
And, so the bullseye rash is only
in one third of cases, and so the Western Blot is an okay test. The
ELISA test is terrible. And the 28-day antibiotic regiment –
it just doesn't work. They've even looked at people who've been on
antibiotics, some of these studies, people have been on antibiotics for
years, and then they do extensive biopsies and they still find
spirochetes. So, you know, why they won't look at their own material, I
just don't understand, frankly, I just don't.
And
the best explanation I've seen for it is two researchers that said,
they think that these kind of protocols are insurance driven, because
the insurance companies do not want to become responsible
for years of treatment for people with a disease
that's difficult to work with. And the financial explanation is the
only one I can find that makes any sense.
Well,
there's a lot of fear going around for people who are depending on
antibiotics and for physicians as well, who are depending on helping
their patients with Lyme through antibiotics and so, now with the
guidelines being posted and you're right, they're not new, but they
were just re-established in October. I've been in that place before,
too. It's a terrifying thing to think that you need a certain medicine
to get better, and you're very sick, and yet you can't get it.
What
would you say to people who are not aware of the alternatives, and yet,
they should be, because they've come to a place where it's really
necessary to start looking into that.
Well,
the one thing that happens, and there isn't any way to make this truth
or the transition that it necessitates easier for any human being.
We're
raised in this culture with certain beliefs about our country and our
culture, and the medical profession, and why they do what they do, and
what we deserve as human beings. And unfortunately, many of these
things turn out to be untrue. There isn't any way around that, and it's
a difficult part of maturity for every human being when they basically
find that they're expendable. Okay? That their culture doesn't really
care, that the medical profession is really more interested in making
money than healing people.
I mean, Chris Rock is
really funny, he says, “Look, the money's not in the cure,
the money's in the medicine.” He's got a great comedic
routine about it. He goes, “When's the last time they cured a
disease? Polio? That was before I was born, you know? It's been a long
time. The money is in the medicine.”
What
happens, is, people are raised with a certain kind of belief and
expectation, and so, everything is fine until something unsettles that,
and they go to a doctor, and then they start finding themselves in the
same place you found yourself in, and they end up with some chronic
disease that the doctors can't really cure. And they actually don't
have the time to sit down and talk with you and really talk about this
stuff, to really be a healer. They're more a dispenser of medicine. The
medicines work fine, if they don't work, you're pretty much on your
own.
At that moment, every human being has to face
a decision, and many people, at that moment, begin struggling with
taking responsibility for their own health. Again, for the first time
maybe in their whole life. And they have to directly encounter the fear
that brings up about them dying or being disabled, and this tremendous
feeling of being alone, like there's nobody out there that really cares
or can help them.
But that moment begins
a journey back to a kind of self-determination of their own health. And
that is one of the greatest gifts a chronic disease like Lyme can offer
any human being. The journey is a difficult one, and often frightening,
but on the other side of it there's this experience of tremendous
empowerment and self-determination that I can't emphasize enough how
empowering and how much well-being comes from that shift in
orientation.
Plus, I found, I haven't
been to a physician really for anything maybe in twenty years, and my
health care costs are extremely low. I've had some fairly significant
illnesses from time to time, but yet they respond so well to these
alternative protocols, that I'm much better than I would have been if
I'd gone through pharmaceutical courses.
So, the
thing that's well known within many of the alternative practitioner
communities is that nothing will make you better in the long run, more
well as a human being, than a good chronic illness. Because it forces
you, it forces a tremendous shift in your personal awareness of
yourself, and what life is about, and what you're doing with your life,
and how to take care of yourself.
And on the other
side of it, it is incredibly, most people, not most, I think everybody
I know that's gone through this process, they're really glad that they
got sick by the time they get well. It forces a kind of self-awareness
that just can't come from anything else, and the gifts from that are
really wonderful. Too many to enumerate.
That's
true, Well, Thank you, it's been such a pleasure talking with you, and
I'm going to wrap it up there even though I'd like to go on and on,
because I just want your last remarks to ring for awhile. You just
really hit a very deep core. And I just want to thank you, also, for
all the help you're bringing to the Lyme community with the book
Healing Lyme. Also, you're aware, aren't you that you have a lot of
fans online?
Yes, I know there's a couple
of web sites that are focused on the protocol. One of them,
Planetthrive, I answer periodic questions from Lyme patients about the
protocol and different aspects of the disease and what they can do
about it. The Lyme patients are some of the most sophisticated people
I've ever had interactions with, and so they've really challenged me to
be a great deal better at my work than almost any other group has.
We're
wonderful people.
[Laughter.]
What
is the name of that web site again, Planetthrive.com?
Actually,
I don't know. If you want to look on my web site, I've got links to the
two web sites I'm aware of, including planetthrive.
And
your web site is gaianstudies.org, right?
Well,
thank you, thank you very much for speaking with me today.
Thank
you.
Suzanne Arthur/ LDRD/ copywrite/ 2006
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