with a question. If you ever work with Lyme
disease, that's a common one. Now Wyoming has Lyme disease. But it's a different
species of Lyme organism than we have in New
England and California.
I had to find that
out the hard way by having Lyme disease
myself and being told that it doesn't exist,
I couldn't have it because I was in the
mountains for a month before I came down with it and I hadn't left 11,000 feet. I would have had to have
gone to an eastern state in order to get Lyme disease. Or northern California,
where it's been for a decade or two. And so as far as I know, I
was the first case in Wyoming and I used that
to learn about it because I really didn't know
anything about Lyme disease.
That's one way to learn
about the immune system. Come down with medical issues and try to figure
a way through it. By the time I went
through treatment, I'd already gone to
stage two Lyme disease and it's very hard to diagnose. Borreliosis is what it's called.
Borrelia burgdorferi
is the spirochete that causes this Lyme disease, was thought to be the only one. I was doing research
with a group of people interested in bighorn
sheep diseases when I had to drop out and
say I can't even remember my name most days, so I
can't be publishing papers with you guys on bighorn sheep. So our colleague in Argentina, who's
working with deer, with selenium deficiencies,
the same thing we were working with here, he said, "Did
you know there's more "than one type of Lyme disease?" And he sent me an ecological
paper that had just come out about eight, nine years ago on these species
of Lyme borellia. There were five different
ones, possibly six.
One was ocean-going,
living on albatrosses. But the one we have in
Wyoming is a different species that probably is carried
by different vectors other than deer ticks, which would explain
why I was fairly sure where I got it from, a black fly that was courting
the bighorn sheep. I was very close to
bighorn sheep every day. At any rate, none of the
standard medicines worked for me and it continued to get worse
over a period of six years until I ran into an alternative
Chinese practitioner, Chinese medicine
practitioner, who gave me some Chinese herbs and
it went away in a day.
And it's never come back. So I went from unemployable,
could hardly walk, and neurologic
symptoms, parasthesia, pains that were unexplained
that were debilitating, joint problems, arthritis, I
couldn't play piano anymore, which really bothered me. Plus I couldn't work because
I couldn't think very well. Cognition was affected.
To a day later being
completely recovered. So I had tremendous enthusiasm
for spreading the word and I knew of a couple other
people with the same symptoms that were also diagnosed
as not having Lyme disease. Their diagnosis was we
don't know what you have. They also recovered
very quickly.
So I started treating people. The thing about some
of these networks with things like Lyme disease
is people hear about it and becomes a network
of people with a disease that's hard to diagnose,
and often untreatable. If you catch stage one
Lyme disease early enough, you can treat it with
doxycycline very efficiently, but once it goes to stage
two, it's not treatable with doxycycline. That's when alternative
medicines work really well.
And it turns out the chemistry
of the Chinese medicines I was taking also occur here
in Native American medicine, medicinal plants. So I start asking people when
they would call up and say, "I hear you dealt
with Lyme disease. "Do you have any clues,
because I'm unemployed, "I have pains that don't have
any connection to reality, "and my joints don't work
and I've been diagnosed "with Lyme disease." Usually the first
ones I got were people that actually were
diagnosed with borreliosis. They responded very quickly
to the Chinese herbs but then I asked a few that
were up for experimenting if they would go with
some experimental herbs that we can try, because I was
able to suppress my symptoms with osha root, which
is a very, very popular Native American herb,
popular in the sense that all of the tribes know about it
and use it for lots of things.
But it's a very
effective pathogenic drug and it kills pathogenic
bacteria and viruses. Very few things
can kill viruses. So this borellia
organism is a spirochete, which is a type of bacteria. We used osha root on
a couple of people and it seemed to
work right away.
So that's what I use now
because it's cheaper, it's easier to find,
and it's native. You don't have to import it. Osha root combined
with French sage, which is equivalent
chemically to the Chinese herb which I forgot the
Chinese name for it, but the Latin name
is artemisia annua. The one we have is
artemisia frigida.
It has same the lactone
glycosides in it, which kill parasites. So I use this plant. It's in season right
now, it's collectable, so I just grabbed this right around my cabin. I dry these and keep them and
make tinctures out of them.
But osha grows in
higher mountains. Going over Togwotee Pass,
you can collect it there and keep a stock dried. It's only good for
two years though, and I found that out by
experimenting on myself, because I was using
osha root in lower doses to suppress symptoms
of Lyme disease. I didn't know at the
time if I took it at the same level, the same
dosage, and for the same period of time that you take
the Chinese herbs, which is about a year,
then it doesn't come back.
I would take it only
when I had symptoms, and it would make all the
symptoms of Lyme go away. But that's how I learned
about these things. I learned a lot
about back issues and kinds of illness everybody
comes up with occasionally and injuries, and I try
to find natural ways that are local to
treat these things. - So the symptoms,
with Lyme disease, the symptoms are
different for everybody? Is that what you're
talking about? - Tremendous variability.
And it has to do with the
type of organism it is. It hides. It's not a normal, ordinary
bacteria that you run into in the first year
of microbiology. It's a spirochete and by nature
they lose their protein coat on the outside, so
any identity it has with your immune system
in terms of antibodies are no longer functional.
So it can hide from
your own immune system after it's been identified by stripping its
protein coat off and then producing a new
identity when it reemerges, maybe a few weeks or
a few months later. I had recurring symptoms,
and most people do, and when it comes back
in three weeks or so, that was the average time
it would disappear for me. I'd have symptoms and
then they would disappear for a few days. I felt normal.
But then we'd come back
and instead of arthritis in my hands, it would
be arthritis in my feet. Or fever. Or when it became stage two,
it's mostly neurological. I went blind for a while.
Could not see anything. I was on a road trip
when it happened so I was stuck on
the side of the road in a place with no cell
reception, no cell phone at all. So I was on my own. It also had affected my right leg, so I didn't
have motor control of my right leg, but
I didn't know that sitting in my truck.
So I pulled out at Green
River, where they have a historic turnout
and you can look at the Oregon Trail
ferry crossing. I was sitting in my truck
unable to see for hours, and finally I started
to get my vision back. I saw some people
that had pulled in. A couple had driven to
the spot far away from me and they were walking in my
direction to look at the river, the Green River.
When they got close, I thought, "Well, I'm starting
to get my vision back "but I may lose it again. "I'm gonna ask them for help." So I opened the door
and put my left foot out and then I swung around and
tried to put my right foot out and I fell down and
I couldn't walk. So I was climbing up
on the door window to get myself vertical
and waving at these people to get their attention. Of course, I looked in
every way like a drunk, and they turned around
and quickly walked back to their car and drove off.
So I was stuck there
for about a day. Then the vision came back. So that's Lyme disease. It's very, very strange.
Borreliosis is about as
cryptic as an illness can be as far as symptoms go. All of them disappear. You actually kill the
organism using osha root, which is well known for
killing cryptic organisms, whether it be a virus
or pathogenic bacteria. - That kind of explains
why it goes undiagnosed, because what do you test for? What do you see as an
evidence or marker of it? - Right, so they
decided on things in the medical profession,
they have certain criteria.
There's five of them, and you
have to have at least three in order to qualify for some
of the harder drugs they use. Like ceftriaxone is a pretty
serious antibiotic drug. You have to take it IV,
but you don't qualify for that treatment
unless you've had three of the five indicators. Sometimes you don't
have those three.
Because it's such a
cryptic symptomatology. You don't often have all
of the required symptoms. So the bullseye bite
site is one of the things that only less than 50% of the
people with Lyme disease get, but that's one of
the required symptoms to be diagnosed with Lyme. I didn't have it.
- It makes me wonder what-- Could there be adverse
effects, though, taking something potent enough
to kill the Lyme disease? - Oh yeah. - And osha is-- - That's part of the
experimenting process, because osha is so potent. If you take it in a high dose
which is what I was really trying to determine with
my experiments with people, what kind of a dose
can you take safely when you're in that
high range of osha root? There's not really much in the
literature on that subject. Osha has been used for a lot
of pathogenic infections.
But this was a new one,
and there's nothing in the literature on it. So I went too high
with one woman and killed off her
intestinal flora, as you would with
Flagyl or a lot of drugs for giardia, which
are very potent drugs. Nothing new in
the medical world. But it took her five-- It took her two months before
she started showing signs of not being able
to absorb food.
She'd killed off her enteric
bacteria and microorganisms. So we took her off of
that, and as it turns out, that was enough time. So I learned two things. You didn't have to
go a whole year, because she's now two
years from that treatment and still has not had a
recurrence of Lyme disease.
But it all went away overnight. The common phone call I get is, "I'm indebted to you for life. "I no longer have any symptoms." Wait and make sure it doesn't
come back before you say that. But that's usually a
long term recovery.
You can get it again
but the treatment lasts about two to
three months, and then it kills the organism..
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