Lyme Disease: The Symptoms, Tests, and Treatments Doctors Miss

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:00)
What if the fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, or these mysterious symptoms you've been chasing for years don't chase back to stress, aging, or burnout, but to a tick bite you don't even remember? Nearly half a million Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease every year, and it remains one of the most misunderstood illnesses in medicine. And many people never see the bullseye rash. Others are told it's all in their head. And for some, the symptoms persist long after treatment ends.
Today, we're going deep on what Lyme is and what its co-infections are and why they're so often missed. And most importantly, how we diagnose and treat them comprehensively from a functional medicine perspective. We're going to cover herbs, supplements, the roles and the limits of antibiotics, and a few innovative therapies that are generating real interests that I think need a lot more research, but that are, I think, hopeful and promising. And I've used a number of patients with success, including things like ozone, hyperbaric oxygen therapy and hyperthermia, which is inducing a temperature or fever, with honest caveats that each one deserves. Now, if you're worried about prevention, you're newly diagnosed or you're still searching for answers after years, this one's for you. So let's dive in. This episode was brought to you by Function. Get access to over 160 lab tests annually at functionhealth.com/mark. What is Lyme disease really? And why it's rarely just the thing by itself. It's usually a part of a complex dysfunction in your body. Lyme disease is an infection that's primarily caused by a corkscrew type bacteria or bacterium called Borrelia burgdorffii. It's transmitted through the bite of an infected blackleg or deer tick. Now part of what makes it so tricky is that the bite usually goes unnoticed. These ticks can be the size of a poppy seed, and most people never remember being bitten. Now early on, Lyme can look just like the flute. Fatigue, chills, fever, headaches, muscle, and joint aches. And I saw a lot of these people in Nantucket when I used to work in the emergency room there, and they'd come in with a cute Lyme. It was pretty classic, but most people never get that. Some people get a classic presentation, but many people don't. Some people get the classic bullseye rash, but here's a big myth I want to bust. Most people don't get that rash, and not every rash looks textbook. No rash does not mean no Lyme disease. As it spreads, Lyme can reach everywhere in the body. The joints, the nervous system, the heart, your immune system. You can get migrating joint pain, brain fog, sleep disruption, nerve pain, palpitations, and a bone deep fatigue that sleep doesn't touch. I personally had Lyme disease, and I've had one of the cone infections called Babesia. It's awful, and I had most of those symptoms, and they're not fun. Now, here's the part conventional medicine often misses, and it certainly missed it in me.
I often use my own healing as a way of helping others, because I've learned what works and what doesn't. But conventional medicine often misses that the ticks rarely carry just one organism. A single bite can deliver lots of cone infections. Sometimes, all check for Lyme, but that's fine, but they missed all these other infections. You might actually not have Lyme. You might have Babesia or Bartonella or Lyckia or Anaplasma or Microplasma. These can dominate the picture. Babesia, which is a malaria-like parasite, I have that one. It brings air hunger, night sweats, chills, and a heavy, I can't catch my breath fatigue. I mean, just so deep fatigue. Bartonella, another one, often shows up as anxiety or rage or mood swings or other weird neuropsychiatric symptoms. It can have foot pain. It's worse in the morning. It can cause stretch marks like skin stria or skin lesions. Or Lyckia and Anaplasma can look more like a severe flu, sometimes with low blood counts. That's why two people with tick-borne illnesses can look completely different. And why so many people get passed from specialist to specialist without a clear answer.
Now, their symptoms don't fit in one box. So how do we diagnose this? Well, this is where functional medicine thinks differently. Chronic Lyme is almost never just Borrelia or Lyme. It's a web of overlapping drivers, multiple infections, immune dysfunction, inflammation, environmental toxins, mold, I had that, food sensitivities, nutritional deficiencies, mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, sleep and autonomic problems, and gut dysfunction, pretty much everything.
In real, I always think of like syphilis was a diagnosis we learned in medical school that causes everything. Lyme disease is like that. It just causes everything. It's also spirochete. It's also this squirrely, squirrely kind of curly bacterium, which was like syphilis, but it's not sexually transmitted. Well, although sometimes people say it can't be, but that's another topic. Now these infections rarely travel low, which is exactly why a single cause, single drug model often falls short and fails to get these people better. Careful symptom inventory is really important across all these symptoms. It often tells me more than any one test. Now, in testing, I'll be honest about the limitations. The standard two-tier approach was something called an Aliza test followed by Western Blot. It was designed for surveillance. It's not for catching every case. It misses early infection. It misses patients who don't actually mount an antianrheal response. So, I read it carefully. The IgM and IgG bands, including species-specific bands that strict CDC criteria live out, I pay attention to all of that. And when the picture warrants it, I use specialty labs like hygienics or infecto labs or galaxy diagnostics that test more broadly. And I test specifically for co-infections. Like Babesia, I use a smear. I use something called PCR, which measures for the actual organism DNA, for antibodies as well. And I remember also that there are different species. For example, Babesia has Babesia duncani and Babesia microti. So, you've got to check for all the species. There's lots of Borrelia species. It gets quite complicated. So, you really need a doctor who knows what they're doing.