No Lyme? Now What?

The second Advance labs test taken in November between episodes came back showing no evidence of spirochetes. What does this mean?
I had the opportunity to meet innovative health care providers Dr David Martz and Dr Neil Rawlins at the Physicians Roundtable conference in March. Dr Martz successfully treated his ALS with IV Rocephin. He had (has?) Lyme disease. Dr Rawlins is an OB GYN doctor from Washington State who is highly knowledgeable about methylation, a subject I discuss in Beyond Mental Illness. During a social event, I told both of them of Chris’s remarkable 19 month period of stability, the longest ever since his first psychotic episode in 1999. During much of that time, he was taking the antibiotics. When he was taking them, since he was doing so well, his psychiatrists took him off the Haldol daily (2 mg), but kept him on Depakote and Seroquel. Chris had been taking his psych drugs consistently but had become increasingly inconsistent in taking the supplements, probiotics, and antibiotics, the latter in response to his psychiatrist’s expressed concerns about his being on antibiotics for so long. During this time he had an episode requiring hospitalization in August. In November, while only taking the higher doses of psychotropic drugs, he had another episode.
I told the doctors I was glad we finally got rid of the Lyme disease but was puzzled over the episodes. Dr Martz told me that if he fails to take antibiotics, his ALS symptoms reoccur. He said that Dr Harvey, the doctor who saved his life, and was an expert in Lyme treatment, also had Lyme disease and that he died two years ago of a heart condition secondary to it. So much for the “cure.” In medicine nothing is as simple as we would like. When Lyme literate doctors call it chronic Lyme, they mean chronic Lyme. I am beginning to suspect that you don’t cure it. You beat it back and continue to hold it in abeyance. Maybe that is why Pam Weintraub’s book is called Cure Unknown.
I discussed the possibility that antibiotics could have played a role in his episodes, mentioning how in the early days of EMPower, clients on the supplement become psychotic after getting antibiotic treatment. Dave Hardy and Tony Stephan had determined that damage to the gut microbiome probably prevented adequate digestion and absorption of nutrients. Clients were instructed to only get antibiotics via a shot or IV, not by mouth. When Dr Popper got involved, he recommended that they double the dosage of supplements and give probiotics when taking antibiotic medications. As I was discussing this, I was intrigued to hear Dr Rawlins tell me that he gives methylfolate and methyl b-12 for infections in order to provide the body with sufficient methyl groups to methylate the DNA of viruses and other infections.
Drs Martz and Rawlings agreed that while the infection may not have been in Chris’s blood, it was still probably present intracellularly. By infection they were referring to any of the multiple forms the organism can take. Unlike other organisms, Borrelia burgdorferi is especially effective in genetically recombining into different forms.
Other factors that may need to be addressed include C pneumonia, dermorphin and, after listening to a recent interview with Dr Neil Nathan on Lyme light radio almost all CSF/Lyme patients have mold internally they can’t clear, whether from the environment or within their own immune-compromised immune systems. If his immune system is playing a role in his episodes—and I believe that they are—than the absence of Lyme disease and other antigens should downregulate the kynurenine pathway and the harmful metabolites created by it. Some labs such as Great Plains can now test for kynurenine metabolites, and, as I stated in my presentation in Florida, Dr Myint has a patent on specific kynurenine-mediated inflammatory biomarkers that are predictive of major depression.