The Questions I’m Tired of Answering

Austin Wine
Lyme Laser Centers, Inc.

I’m not actually tired of answering these questions at all. In fact, I love any opportunity to help provide a Lyme sufferer with real answers to real questions. What tires me is that these questions often posed as statements, should be fundamentally basic questions to answer but are being either ignored or poorly answered by many healthcare professionals. So here are the 3 questions that I hear from Lyme sufferers nearly every day and the answers you should be getting.

If I address my bacterial infection, will I feel better?

No, you probably won’t. I could not be more frustrated with the poorly guided advice nearly all Lyme sufferers are spoon-fed about getting well. “Get rid of the bugs and you’ll be fine.”. If you focus your treatment of Lyme disease solely on the elimination of harmful bacteria, you are going to be quite disappointed with the outcome, or lack thereof.

Elimination of B. Burgdorferi, Babesia, Bartonella, or any of the numerous other associated infections will not reverse the negative impact that those infections have caused your systems, tissue, and function. It’s that simple. In order to truly heal and regenerate those affected components of your body (and your life), you must participate in actions that encourage regeneration. For a Lyme sufferer, this nearly always includes nutrition, regeneration of digestive and immune systems, improving detoxification mechanisms within the body, and lastly, addressing the very real emotional and/or physical trauma that results from this disease. Don’t fail the entire system by allowing one system to go unaddressed. You are only as strong as your weakest link. This is one of the many reasons why we hear “antibiotics worked for me for a while then I felt bad again”.

If I took antibiotics then I don’t have Lyme anymore, right?

This question is often projected as a fact but is always followed by a “right?” in hopes of receiving a confirmatory “yes”. In fact, the correct answer is most often a resounding “no”. Much like the statement “salt causes hypertension” (it doesn’t, by the way), these statements are ingrained in our psyche through years and years of regurgitated assumptions that antibiotics continue to achieve what we thought they did 50 years ago. Although antibiotics have a purpose, decades of research is confirming that for treating Lyme and many other bacterial illnesses, antibiotics are not the answer and that they may actually be making things much, much worse. If you want to know why antibiotics won’t work, or when they will, read Why Antibiotics Do Not Work for Lyme Disease and When Will Antibiotics Work?

I feel worse so I must be getting better, right?

Again, a commonly stated-as-fact question that is just not true. Sounds crazy, right? Unfortunately, we hear this a lot. The body is a wonderfully complex organism composed of numerous different systems and forms of tissue, dozens of purpose-driven organs, and trillions of powerful cells. And yet, at no point can any of those components be both deteriorating and regenerating at the same time. When you work out, you push that system or tissue by demanding more performance, resulting in stress to that system. During the recovery stage of the workout process, the regeneration of that tissue allows for growth, ensuring that its potential to perform that task in the future is enhanced (assuming you are working out correctly). Your muscles do not “grow” during the workout itself, but stimulate the protein synthesis that does “grow” muscle in the hours following the workout.

Feeling short periods of discomfort can be a normal part of any healing journey, but to pursue continued worsening of symptoms in the belief that it is what will heal you is just illogical and goes against the natural processes of health and regeneration. By consistently stressing the systems of the body in the hopes of achieving recovery from Lyme disease, you eliminate the potential for those systems to achieve a state of recovery, creating more harm than good to those systems and the other systems that rely on its proper function. Finding the correct balance of purposeful stress-inducing stimulation and regeneration can be challenging, but when done correctly, your body will no longer need to suffer just to get healthy.

Sincerely,

Austin Wine

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(2) https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13071-019-3495-7

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