The question of whether or not Lyme disease can be cured is a recurring question that is asked every doctor who is faced with a person suffering from the disease.
The term “Cure” is almost taboo in the healing arts profession. No doctor that I know of is willing to say they can cure any illness…especially not Lyme disease.
Before we just say an absolute “No” that Lyme disease is incurable lets see what the best medical dictionaries define the word “Cure” as meaning. After all, these medical dictionaries are the basis of what even the most agnostic doctors hold up as “truth.”
The following are taken from Dorland’s Medical Dictionary and Stedman’s Medical Dictionary.
Сure noun.
1. Restoration of health; recovery from disease.
2. A method or course of medical treatment used to restore health.
3. An agent, such as a drug, that restores health; a remedy.
4. Something that corrects or relieves a harmful or disturbing situation.
Cure verb.
1. To restore to health.
2. To effect a recovery from: cure a cold.
3. To remove or remedy (something harmful or disturbing): cure an evil.
Reading these definitions one immediately notices that at no time does the word cure mean all the bacteria are gone. A patient of mine said it best on a Lyme forum, “Antibiotics are for killing, not healing.” Now doctors may read this and say the antibiotic “killing” of the bacteria creates healing by eliminating the cause of the disease…but in their own scientific scrutiny does this line of thought hold up to its claims? Not according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the worlds leading, peer-reviewed, medical journal.
Articles in the JAMA encourage doctors to stop treating every suspected infection with antibiotics. This is because international research, which is cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have demonstrated that a doctor will usually prescribe antibiotics for a “routine” sinus, ear, eye, respiratory infection for approximately 7-10 days. What the research found is that even without prescribing antibiotics that the infection was resolved with 7-10 days.
So the medical research and the medical definition of cure show that a “Cure” is not the absence of bacteria. The people experienced a “Restoration of health” without killing all of the bacteria. And yes for those of you who might say the body killed the bacteria via the immune system, this too is not borne out by the medical research that reveals the Strep or whatever bacteria is was is still in the body, only it is now non-pathological.
Can Lyme disease be cured? Before answering that question, possibly the medical dictionaries are not using the same definition as the general public.
According to Dictionary.com
Cure noun
1. A means of healing or restoring to health; remedy.
2. A method or course of remedial treatment, as for disease.
3. A successful remedial treatment; restoration to health.
4. A means of correcting or relieving anything that is troublesome or detrimental.
It would appear that everyone agrees that a “Cure” is a condition of the body returning to health. If it is true that “Cure” is a restoration of health and thereby the absence of symptoms, then “Disease” is a loss of health with the onset of symptoms.
Do we suppose that bacteria and viruses are somehow stronger during the winter months? After all, winter is the time of year that people typically get sick the most with infections…of course not. The bacteria and viruses don’t somehow get stronger in wintertime. The human body is weakened by the extreme cold and inactivity, not to mention the mental and emotional fear that has been ingrained in us by the media that “We are entering flu season!”
So we see that when the body is optimally healthy we enjoy symptom-free life. When the body is weakened we experience dys-ease.
When a person gets over strep throat they are cured and the symptoms go away without antibiotics within 10 days. Does this mean they will never get strep throat again? Are they a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off? No! If they go to a rock concert and yell and scream, while drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and smoke, then the mucus membranes in the throat will be damaged and the strep bacteria, which were always there even in the healthy throat, create the “strep throat” symptoms again.
“But this is Lyme disease!” I can hear people saying. “But I was completely healthy before I got bitten by a tick!” Of course the bacteria do matter once it has gotten out of control in a person’s body. And no, you were not optimally healthy before you got bitten, even if you were a tri-athlete. No bacteria can thrive in an optimally health human.
In medical “science” it is convenient in a disease like Lyme disease, where the laboratory tests have such a high rate of false-negative tests, that after a course of antibiotics a person is often proclaimed cured, when the follow-up lab tests come back negative. The person with the Lyme disease is left in a perplexing position because often none of their symptoms are gone and their health has definitely not been restored.
This is not good science.
So do I believe that Lyme disease is curable? Yes absolutely, to the degree that your body can be repaired. If your body has been damaged beyond repair by the medicines, by accidents, by surgeries, by radiation, by trauma by any means, it will be limited to that degree.
The restoration of health, “CURE” is the result of facilitating the restoration of the integrity and function of every aspect of the body, mind, and spirit. Every organ, system, tissue, and cell must be restored to optimum integrity all at the same time.
This is the goal of American Biological Medicine, to use the best scientific understanding and to push the natural science as we understand it, beyond the simplistic blood tests, and yes it is simplistic to base health on the presence or absence of bacteria or antibodies present in the blood, to work with the perspective that at no time can or should a doctor harm one part of the body in order to correct another.
When through whatever methods, natural or otherwise, a person experiences a restoration of health, by definition they are cured.