The Lyme Disease Epidemic & the Inflammation Connection — A Conversation with Dr. Horowitz and Dr. Daniel Amen

Richard Horowitz (0:00)

If you're tired and you're achy and your brain's not working properly with memory issues, with psychiatric issues, insomnia, it's a really high chance you've been exposed to Lyme. This is a spreading epidemic across the world. 14.5% of the global population has now been exposed to Lyme. That's one out of seven people on the planet. I've seen patients after a tick bite, all of a sudden become anxious, depressed, develop obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia with the auditory and visual hallucinations. And in many of these patients, especially the ones with rage, the Bartonella species were usually underlying it. My whole life's work has been trying to find a cure for these chronically ill patients.

Daniel Amen (0:35)

What are some of the ways you have found to help people get through it?

Richard Horowitz (0:41)

When people say, I'm much more anxious, I'm much more depressed, I have much more pain, I'm foggy, it's inflammation. So what I did in the protocol is...

Daniel Amen (0:52)

Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day.

SPEAKER_3 (1:05)

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Win a free evaluation with BrainSpec Imaging. Join us for the taping of Brain Rescue, Wednesday, October 7th at 9 a.m. at the First Christian Church, Huntington Beach.

Daniel Amen (1:30)

I'm so excited for Change Your Brain Every Day. We are going to talk about something that's actually very important to many of you.

And I think that is going to be a huge part of the future of psychiatric medicine, and that's infectious disease. With me today is Dr. Richard Horowitz, who's a board-certified internist and the medical director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center, an integrative medical center which combines both mainstream and integrative approaches in the treatment of Lyme disease and other tick-borne disorders. He's treated over 13,000 Lyme and tick-borne disease patients in the last 41 years and patients coming from all over the world. He's dedicated his life to helping those stricken with this devastating illness. He has a new book, Ending Chronic Illness, a revolutionary new program to reverse inflammation and heal persistent disease out October 14th, right around the time we'll release the podcast. And, you know, Richard, I'm a psychiatrist, so why do I care about Lyme disease? When I started seeing, when I started looking at people's brains, I would often see one of two patterns, either inflammation that I couldn't explain, or a damaged brain that often was from a chronic illness like Lyme.

How did you get interested in this work?

Richard Horowitz (3:32)

Oh, this was a bit coincidental. In fact, by the way, you'll find this interesting. I wanted to be a psychiatrist when I was in medical school. I did seven years of medical training in Belgium and Brussels. I won't tell you the whole story of why I didn't go into psychiatry. Let's just say, internal medicine being kind of a medical detective ended up really catching me, but it was in my seventh year of medicine. This is all in French, by the way.

I was studying with the Tibetan Lamas. I'd been studying meditation for several years.

And I went to Lamagendhan and I said, Lamagendhan, I'm about to go out into the world as a doctor. What do you want me to know? What's the most important thing? And he said, Richard, the most important thing is exchange yourself with others. Put others, you know, put yourself in their shoes, do for others what you'd want done for yourself. And it's kind of generic advice if you study with the Tibetans, like love, wanting other people to be happy and compassion, wanting other people to be free from suffering. But the reason I mentioned the story is I finished residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City in the city hospitals. And I moved to upstate New York about two hours north in the Hudson Valley and didn't realize I was moving into the largest Lyme endemic area in the United States back in 1987 And here I see these people with bullseye rashes.

Roughly 75% get better with doxycycline or amoxicillin. But then the 25-30% start coming back and you do what you learn to do as an internist, you refer. They went to psychiatrists, infectious disease doctors, neurologists, rheumatologists. Nobody could tell me what was wrong. And then I remembered Gendron Rinpoche's advice and I said, you know, I'm going to do my best to figure out what's wrong with these people. Fast forward now 42 years, 13,000 patients letter. That's how this whole thing kind of got started. Just trying to find answers for these chronically ill sick people.